


If There Were Water

by stickman



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe - Domestic, Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, Haunted Houses, Isolation, M/M, Psychological Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-30
Updated: 2014-05-30
Packaged: 2018-01-27 14:39:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 36,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1714265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stickman/pseuds/stickman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bilbo Baggins might be in over his head. He’s purchased an old stone house atop a hill overlooking a city he doesn’t know, and plans to live quietly, largely ignoring the rest of the world. But it’s early April, the rainy season, and the roof leaks, and there's something strange about Bywater House that he can't quite figure out. </p><p>Thorin Oakenshield is in his fourth month of trying to reconcile his own grief with his failures at anything remotely resembling a competent single parent, living out of a shoebox flat with Fíli (seven, sullen, and stubborn as hell) and Kíli (five, resilient but cracking), working crap jobs and hating everything including himself.</p><p>Under the cover of rainy afternoons and sleepless nights, roof repairs and building restoration, Bilbo and Thorin try to figure out how one navigates isolation, and how one breaks out of it. Every step they manage to take forward finds them dragged back again; every question asked has too many answers, or too few. This is a story about living in a world where everyone is on their own, always, and how things go on.</p><p>[for ewebean & noneedforsuspicion, and the 2014 Hobbit Big Bang]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for The Hobbit Big Bang (hobbitstory on LJ), in collaboration with 2 marvelous artists: ewebean and noneedforsuspicion.
> 
> Art by ewebean: [here](http://ewebean.tumblr.com/post/87357881151/illustration-for-stickmansagas-story-if-there)  
> Art by noneedforsuspicion: [here](http://noneedforsuspicion.tumblr.com/post/88253996473/man-this-is-horrendously-late-but-this-is-an)
> 
> This was my first time doing a Big Bang challenge, and though the timing could have been better, the overall experience was really great. To be a part of such positive, collaborative energies in this fandom, and to have so many artists and writers working alongside (please check out their works--I've seen very exciting things so far) was such a good experience. I wrote this story faster than I've written anything else in a while, and I'm not sure how that turned out. I guess we'll see how you think it turned out, though, right?
> 
> Other links:  
> [8tracks](http://8tracks.com/stickmansaga/if-there-were-water)  
> [the ITWW fic tag on my tumblr](http://stick-around-town.tumblr.com/tagged/itww-fic)  
> [Bywater house](http://stick-around-town.tumblr.com/post/87292616186/bywater-house-from-if-there-were-water-the)  
> [a fantastic photoset/edit by bilboo (perkynurples on Ao3)](http://bilboo.tumblr.com/post/87417352958/if-there-were-water-by-stickman-bilbo-baggins)  
> [a lovely edit by little-miss-carrot](http://little-miss-carrot.tumblr.com/post/87619986081/just-a-little-appreciation-post-for-if-there-were)  
> [and Thorin looking properly disheveled, thanks to harmleikur](http://harmleikur.tumblr.com/post/94995733922/thorin-from-if-there-were-water-by-stickman)
> 
> \----------

 

 

 

 

 

 

>  
> 
> “All over the whole round earth . . . people are drawn inward within their little shells of rooms . . . and none can care, beyond that room; and none can be cared for, by any beyond that room; and it is small wonder they are drawn together so cowardly close . . . and wonder only that an age that has borne its children and must lose and has lost them, and lost life, can bear further living; but so it is.”
> 
> —James Agee, _Let Us Now Praise Famous Men_ (1941)

 

CHAPTER ONE

 

It’s raining again, the kind of late April rain that can pour down all day without interruption, so steady as to wash the world away. There is rain drumming against the windows, overflowing the gutters, flooding the sunken garden at the back of the house—nothing but water. Outside, barely visible through the fog, the landscape has dimmed into greens and blues. There is a chill in the house at odds with the soft golden light in the study. Somewhere, the roof is leaking, water droplets falling evenly to pool and gather on the floorboards. As the rain wears on the house creaks and settles, all crooked walls and windows that don’t quite shut, doors drafty in the winter and swollen in the summer and shifting restlessly in between.

            Bilbo Baggins, twenty-six, pseudonymous author and social recluse and generally unremarkable heir to the Baggins family fortune—greater in name than in number, now, not that anyone will believe it—might be in over his head. The first step to facing one’s problems is to acknowledge them; everyone knows this. Bilbo sighs, and leaves his study to fetch a bucket from the kitchen, walking through the house in search of the leak and resolutely thinking of anything but.

            The house is a crumbling old Arts & Crafts Style from the turn of the twentieth century, two stories and an attic but built partially into the slope of the hill so that the ground floor is on two separate levels and the dormer windows don’t match up, a newer and slightly haphazard addition of a sunroom off the west side. It has two parlours plus two studies, four bedrooms, and something the realtor tried to market cheerfully as a “breakfast nook,” at which point Bilbo had been so ready to be rid of her that he simply wrote out a check. For such a large, rambling house set on five acres of land, atop a hill overlooking the city, it was a remarkably affordable offer. And the nook, as Bilbo has taken to calling it despite his best efforts, is actually one of his favourite spots—a long bay window arching over the back lawn. He has tea there, most mornings, and reads the paper, and asks himself what on earth he is doing, fooling himself at playing _This Old House_ while leafing through a book of William Morris’s wallpaper patterns and wishing he had someone around to show him how this was supposed to work.

            There are at least two problems with that plan: he’s moved up here to leave behind everyone he knew, and he doesn’t even really like people anyway, so he’s not about go out and find some new ones now that he’s finally found solitude. He’s perfectly comfortable where he is. Even if the attic is flooding. It’s a small flood, Bilbo tells himself; And besides, you did say you had to wash the floors. Straightening up, bucket squarely positioned under the worst of the leaks, Bilbo stretches his arms over his head and looks around. The house wasn’t advertised as furnished and yet the longer he stays here—going on four weeks, now—the more furniture he finds, tucked away under threadbare sheets in the attic, more furniture than that small space should be able to hold. And then there are nights when it’s three in the morning and he’s fallen asleep at his desk only to wake up and find everything just a little bit shifted. A chair slightly to the left of its last position. Books on a shelf he remembers leaving empty. No matter how hard he tries, he can’t recall moving the long desk into the front parlour, or how he managed to get the legs to fit through that doorway.

            In retrospect, he should probably have been a bit more concerned about that.

            Everything in the attic manages to be covered in dust, no matter how much time Bilbo spends cleaning. He runs his hand over the lump of a chair draped in faded red and cream paisley sheets on his way back downstairs, thinking about how it would look in the sitting room. The roof repairs have just moved to the top of his to-do list, though. And no matter how many home improvement magazines he has read or any number of memories of shop class in secondary school, that is not something he’s qualified to do himself. That alone wouldn’t normally stop him; it is an awfully high roof, though. He doesn’t particularly want to break his neck, even if the sunken garden would make an uncannily good cemetery.

            This kind of morbidity is new to him.  It’s a taste in the back of his mouth, coopery and bright and a little bit sour. He files it away for later inspection. Right now, it’s later than he meant to stay awake yet again. With the roof leak temporarily under control—by a very loose definition—he double-checks that the front door is locked, shuts the light off in the study, and crawls into his bed without bothering to change into pajamas. The rain beats against the wide window off the foot of the bed. Bilbo watches the droplets streak past against the dim blur of distant city lights until he falls asleep.

            In the morning, it’s still raining, same as it has been for the past three days. Bilbo wakes at seven o’clock and rolls over to smother himself in pillows, groaning. An hour or so later he gets out of bed. The floorboards are cold underfoot, as if it weren’t spring. The bedroom window sits atop a small rise of hill, and even though he knows he’ll get wet, Bilbo can’t quite resist opening the window and sticking his head out. The wind and water hit him almost immediately, soaking through the thin knit of his sweater. The big oak on the front lawn lost a branch overnight—he sees it lying halfway across the front walkway. More maintenance, Bilbo thinks, and steps back inside, shuts the door. After a shower and breakfast—in the nook—he checks on the leaking roof. A bit of work with tape and a square of oilskin makes a funnel, directing the flow more accurately into the bucket.

            Well, he had wanted spring, and spring in this part of the country apparently means rain. The catch on the attic’s skylight is broken—another new addition, he can see clearly now in the dim morning light—and it’s blown open, a gap an inch or two wide letting in the rain. There’s a ladder in the shed out in the garden. Rather than go down two flights of stairs and into the rain, Bilbo drags a low wooden bench over, balances a chair on top of it, and clambers up, straining with his arms over his head to reach the window’s catch. He gets a face full of rain anyway for his efforts but manages to tug the window shut, and some rooting around in the old seaman’s chest in the attic’s far corner turns up a spool of wire so he can tie the fasteners together. It’s not exactly his neatest work, but it will do.

            The thing about living out here is that Bilbo is learning that for all his skills in the garden, his cultivated ability to avoid people he doesn’t really like, and the fact that he has, on occasion, written a fairly decent book, he has never had to fend for himself before. He has always gotten by. After “getting by” the deaths of not only one but both of his parents, “getting by” the feeling of his family home grown too large and yet not holding enough space for him inside its walls, or the carefully concerned greetings of neighbours and distant relations, Bilbo realised he wasn’t actually doing anything with his life. Nothing at all. And it’s not that there was anything inherently wrong with that, but once the last of the well-wishers went away and his pantry emptied out of casseroles and cakes, once the season started to change and his latest manuscript was sent back by his editor with more red pen than he’d ever seen before, he decided—in a way, it was decided for him, but he hasn’t made that particular connection yet—that he needed to get away.

            So he left his childhood home in the care of his cousin, the only family member he can actually stand, and he packed his bags, boxed up his books, stuffed it all into the tiny trunk and backseat of his father’s 1962 Triumph Herald 948 Coupe and drove off. At first he thought he’d do some kind of writer-in-residence thing: find a big old house, out in the country, maybe a castle, and pay room and board, wander the gardens and talk to the groundskeeper, that sort of thing. So when his editor phoned with an offer to take a look at an old stone cottage—“Plenty of charm,” he’d said, “I think it’s just the place for you,” insisting on calling it a cottage when it could easily fit a family of six—Bilbo accepted his directions and changed his course, heading north instead of out to the coast. He’d never been to this part of the country before. Moors and flatlands, bog country, water running through everything, and then up into the hills. Driving through the city at the base of the hills, Bilbo wondered if this was really going to be a place he could come to like. And when he wound his way out past the city limits and up to the house, it wasn’t his editor who was waiting for him, but a realtor. The old man had taken his request for “residency” in earnest, it seemed, and Bilbo found himself with a somewhat nervous young woman in a dark skirt-suit who wanted to show him this “gorgeous old place, loads of character.” “Yes, I’ve heard,” Bilbo replied, and kind of wanted to tell her he wasn’t interested, but then . . . the house really was impressive, even if its groundplan and layout were a bit odd. And he felt bad about turning her away.

            What Bilbo Baggins doesn’t know is this: the house he’s moved into has a name, has a history dating back more than a century, and has been empty for nearly forty years—for good reason, most would say. The city’s residents don’t like to look at Bywater, brooding up there in the hills. It’s too old-fashioned, too uneven, too large, full of too many memories and with plenty of space for them to grow. When word started to spread that someone was buying it, everyone hoped it would be razed to the ground. The realtor who showed Bilbo the property nearly quit her job the morning of, rather than set foot inside. No one knows the real story—or if they do, they’re not sharing—but in that way that all old houses are talked about under the breath, only in passing, everyone agrees: Bywater is haunted.

            It’s not that anyone died a tragic death swooning from its slanted roofline, or was gruesomely murdered in either of its two wide parlours. And the house itself, though it definitely needs work, is normal enough, if you excuse the oddities of its placement on the landscape: swathes of heather running right up to the ivy-covered walls, unassuming front door, long driveway—even though the driveway is little more than a dirt track, and Bilbo’s car struggles to keep its wheels. There shouldn’t, logically, be anything wrong with Bywater at all. It’s just an old house. But that’s precisely the trouble: it’s an _old_ house, a house that has seen history, a house that has stood exactly the same while the city changed and the world changed and its inhabitants grew old, up on the hill. Waiting. Watching. Accumulating time like water, until the very floorboards and joists swell with the weight of a hundred years. A house like that, once it fills up, leaves no space for anything else.

            What Bilbo Baggins does know is that he needs to phone a local roofing company—needs to actually talk to someone—so he can get someone out to fix his roof, provided that the rain will let up for even half an hour. He’s not optimistic about that, but the contractor he speaks to on the other end says they may as well make arrangements. “Weather changes quickly, this part of the country,” the man says, and Bilbo rolls his eyes, looking out at the flood that is his back lawn.

            “Well, apart from the roof,” he says, “there are a couple of other things I may need fixed. I wonder if you could help me?”

            “Such as?”

            “The back steps sag, for one thing, and I think the sunroom beams are rotting through.”

            “Anything else?” the man asks. He sounds bored. Bilbo briefly contemplates phoning another company. He knows how young he sounds over the phone, how inexperienced; it’s part of the reason he writes under a pseudonym. Once people meet him in person, it’s even harder to get them to take him seriously, short and slight as he is, with rather unfortunately large ears. “Hello?” the contractor asks, and Bilbo snaps back to attention.     

            “Oh, right. Yes, the, er, the back chimney’s sort of falling to bits. I don’t know if that would be your area or—”

            “You’d want a stone mason,” the man says. “I can put a note in, see if we have a fellow. Where’d you say you were located?”

            “22 West Farthing Way.”

            The man on the other end of the line is quiet.

            “It’s, ah, the old cottage on top of the hill?” Bilbo adds, trying to clarify.

            “Yeah,” the man says, after a long pause. “I know it. Listen,” he starts to say, and then clears his throat. “Maybe you’d better—”

            “Oh, damn it,” Bilbo cuts in; “The back door’s just blown open. I have to go, sorry. So when the weather clears, I’ll expect your man. Yes? Wonderful, thanks very much.” Bilbo hangs up—corded phone, who even still uses those?—and skids around the kitchen counter to wrench the back door shut again. There is a pool of water on the floor already, leaf bits and debris scattered on the threshold. Once he has a few kitchen towels pressed up against the bottom of the door and has mopped up the mud and sticks, he realises the construction company never actually confirmed that they would send someone. He could call them back. Or he could just wait and see what happens when the rain stops—whenever that might be—which is, on the whole, a better and less awkward option. Feeling unusually accomplished for someone who hasn’t really done anything, Bilbo makes himself a cup of tea. From the sunroom, whose name has yet to apply, he watches the wildflower garden sway in the wind, staunch blues and purples against such grey skies.

            He has a whole list of work that needs doing on the house. The wallpaper in one of the upstairs bedrrooms is peeling, a combination of years of moisture and sealed windows. The range in the kitchen is temperamental and requires its pilot light to be re-lit nearly every week; it goes out at the slightest draft. The back door, apparently, doesn’t latch properly, which accounts for the draft. The floors in general could use refurbishing; there are deep gouges in the wood that Bilbo can’t account for, and blackened corners on every level, as if the house had been on fire at some point, but only enough to char a bit. The plumbing could stand to be re-done, so that it doesn’t take fifteen minutes of running water to get the bath warmed. And then there are heaps of cosmetic things, fixtures that need replacing, cabinets updating; someone, presumably the last owner, thought chroming the second-floor bath was a grand idea. Bilbo’s closed the door on that space, can’t even stand to look at it. A house like this has to be treasured, rebuilt piece by piece, with the proper attention to its history. He has plenty of catalogues and guides to period interiors, but even though the house is old enough to merit outside documentation of its history, his own efforts have consistently turned up nothing. So Bywater is, in many ways, a chance for Bilbo to re-invent himself.

            The rain does let up eventually, fading out towards the evening. From the window in his bedroom Bilbo can look out over the city, the low-lying valley shrouded in fog while up on the hill Bywater stands exposed. On nights like this, when the moon breaks through the clouds and lights up the yard, plants swollen fat with water, eaves still dripping, Bilbo likes to pretend he is on an island, his own outpost above the flood, drawn inwards unto itself—a closed world.

 

It’s five-thirty in the morning and he can’t sleep. The springs of the pull-out sofa in his frankly awful one-bedroom flat are digging into his back and every time he rolls over he risks upsetting the cut length of PVC piping supporting the mattress and falling to the floor. The sun won’t be up for another hour and a half but he may as well get up—a good night’s sleep has been a lost cause for so long now it’s becoming routine. Of course, there’s not much one can do at five-thirty in the morning, at least while trying not to wake the two boys presumably fast asleep just on the other side of the thin wall. A shower’s out, that’s for sure; Thorin has found, though, that if he muffles the coffee percolator with a kitchen towel, he can brew a pot relatively quietly. So he makes coffee and turns on his computer, browsing local classified ads and hating every second of it.

            At thirty-four, Thorin Oakenshield kind of thought he’d have his life figured out by now. A stable job, a decent house, weekends off, trip now and then to the islands to do some hiking. And up until last year—four months ago, really—that had been true. Oakenshield’s was a small company, a hand-made furniture start-up he began running in his last years of school out of their woodworking shop, but over the years and with the help of a couple of friends, it had grown into a respectable business. Not by his father’s standards, but then, Thorin mostly tries not to think about that. He had done well enough. Gathered a loyal clientele, sold all his pieces at asking price because of the detailed workmanship, had a favourable write-up or two in home improvement magazines and interior design catalogues. A fine update of the Arts and Crafts style, they all called him; an heir to Morris and Voysey in the modern age. Worth the trip out to the coast. He still has those reviews, cut out and pasted into a photo album somewhere by his younger sister, Dís. He can recall, quite distinctly, being hugely embarrassed at the time. He never thanked her properly.

            This is why he shouldn’t wake up so early: too much time for introspection. Dís has been dead for four months and his life is no longer his own now, and that’s all there is to it. Her sons Fíli, age seven, and Kíli, age five, are his responsibility, even if he would do anything rather than let them hear him thinking of them that way. As a burden. Sleeping peacefully, if a little cramped, side by side on the double bed in a bedroom barely wide enough to fit it, the boys are probably the only thing in Thorin’s life right now that he actually likes. He’d been living three hundred kilometers or so to the southeast, out along the coastline, an old dairy barn converted into a furniture shop with the hayloft as his office and flat. Dís had told him it was “unbearably hip” and brought him fresh flowers every time she visited, seeming to take special delight in watching her older brother trim their stems and place them in an old cut-glass bottle beside the sink. Even when she was sick, she still made the trip down to see him, the boys running out of the car practically before it stopped and tackling him to the ground. Thorin taught them—city kids that they were—how to climb trees, how to fish, how to make flint arrowheads and shoot a bow, how to plane a piece of wood. Every third word out of their mouths had been “Uncle” and they had to be dragged bodily away from him at the end of their stay.

            These days, he’s lucky if they say ten words to him put together, or go three days without breaking anything. He came up here when Dís died, thinking he’d take them back to the barn with him. Thinking that they would find a way to carry on together. But one look at Fíli’s bright, defiant eyes and Kíli’s tear-streaked face and he couldn’t find it in himself to drag them away from everything they knew, not when they’d just lost so much. Except their fancy private school tuition and house mortgage combined were more than Thorin could afford, particularly since he’d all but quit his job as Oakenshield’s head carpenter and Dis’s ex-husband’s family were proving irrational and impossible to negotiate with. Frustrated with the whole affair and needing to leave, desperately, before he punched someone, Thorin all but threw the deed to the house at them. He may have also shouted rude words—again, something he tries not to think about, as he had Kíli in his arms at the time, and Fíli at his heels, and whatever other shortcomings he might have as a parental sort of influential figure, he’d like to think they won’t grow up to be quite so angry all the time. The present forecast isn’t looking good, he has to admit; and those shortcomings are rapidly turning into failures. At least the boys are still in school, even if he doesn’t know how he’s going to pay for it when the next term starts.

            Holding his lit cigarette out of the one window in the main room, Thorin lets himself close his eyes and have a moment—just a brief one—of hating everything, including himself. Uphold the family name? Find a way to carry on together? Who the hell are you kidding? You can’t even find a goddamn job.

            Everything he’s applied for in the past few days has come to nothing. Either he’s overqualified, or the hours would conflict with him making even the barest effort at looking after the boys, and he’s been forcing them to spend far too much time on their own as it is. Fíli takes his younger brother to school in the mornings, walks him home in the afternoons, sometimes gets dinner ready, helps Kíli with his homework and his shower and reads him a story before bed, all while Thorin is out pouring concrete or waxing corporate office floors or any number of menial labour jobs he can’t stand, night shifts and dirty work, the kinds of jobs no one actually wants to do. Sometimes he fills in on the local fire crew, returning to the ropes he’d learned back during school when he’d volunteered at the fire and ambulance station. But even when Thorin’s working six jobs, a different one every day of the week, coming home with a sore back and rough hands, a headache from gritting his teeth all day, it still doesn’t pay the bills. He needs something steady, something nine-to-five. Ideally, something nine-to-four. He’s spent the last months as a glorified handyman, showing up at construction yards and hoping they’ll take him on for a day’s pay, usually cash in an envelope at the end of the shift. Once in a while he’s been able to catch a longer gig installing flooring or doing landscaping and then the company will cut him a check at the end of the week, but he feels like he’s sixteen again and working crap jobs just to get a bit of extra money, so he could go drinking with his mates or buy parts for the motorbike he was rebuilding. It’s not a career, it’s not what he trained for; he’s throwing away all his skills as a craftsman. There’s no artistry, no room for expression. Concrete blocks, neat squares of lawn. He hates it.

            Stubbing out his cigarette, Thorin goes back to his computer. The city’s not large enough to have its own theatre, gallery, or any sort of place he could showcase his work, even if he had any of his tools up here with him. He thought briefly of applying for a position with the boys’ schools, as a woodworking instructor, but his relationship with Fíli and Kíli is strained enough as it is, without the added strangeness of him teaching them and their classmates. They need some time apart from him. There’s a new local classified and odd-job ad listing that catches his eye, though, offering surprisingly good pay for repairing a roof and a chimney on an old house outside of town. The construction company that posted the ad is one Thorin’s worked with before, even if the job is likely one for a union man or an inside contractor. He scribbles down their number and the details, and then clears his computer before putting it away to start making the boys breakfast. Doesn’t want them to know exactly how many jobs he’s working these days, or how many more he’s searching for.

            Breakfast is leftover porridge from earlier in the week, bread that’s slightly stale but all right for toasting—no toaster, just straight on a griddle on the stove—and honey, a gift from Thorin’s eccentric and somewhat frightening neighbour back on the coast. He keeps bees and harvests the honey himself. They used to trade: Thorin would carve increasingly detailed wooden bowls and plates in exchange for more honey than he could possibly eat. Even though he hasn’t been keeping up his end of the deal, and didn’t tell anyone his new address, the shipment of honey arrived on his doorstep his first week in the flat and has continued like clockwork since. The boys tear through it at a pace Thorin never could. He keeps meaning to send something in return, at least a thank-you note, but has no idea what to say.

            Fíli slumps into the kitchen in his school pants and an undershirt, dragging a hand through unruly curls. He doesn’t even look at Thorin, just sits at their narrow table and yawns. Thorin’s only recently managed to stop sighing every time this happens. He serves up a bowl of porridge and a plate of toast, and goes to wake Kíli. The younger boy’s still asleep, curled into a ball with his back to the wall and one hand stretched out to the indent where his brother had been lying. Thorin sits down on the edge of the mattress gently. It sags beneath his weight as he leans over to put a hand to Kíli’s shoulder.

            “Morning, Kíli,” he says. “Time to get up.”

            “Mmmf.” Kíli uncurls and opens his eyes. “Where’s Fíli?”

            “Having breakfast. Come on, up.” Thorin stands and looks around the room—one desk, a wardrobe, narrow curtained window.

            Kíli rolls out of bed and trots into the kitchen still in his pajamas. Sits at the table, bare feet swinging, munching on toast. This is the only hour of the day—before either of them are fully awake—that Thorin feels like they could be a family, just the three of them. Not half an hour later, when both boys are dressed in carefully pressed grey slacks (shorts for Kíli, who hasn’t graduated to full pants) and navy blazers, pale blue button downs and striped ties, holding school satchels and paper lunch sacks, Thorin will look at them and see only a divide.

            They walk to school most days, hand in hand out of the housing estate and into the old part of the city. Kíli’s still in primary school, and Fíli’s a year younger than the usual cutoff for his school, but both are smart enough—and Dís was connected, and charming, enough—that they’ve advanced a year. Across the road from Fíli’s old stone school is a smaller brick building, newer, built to prepare younger students to enter the co-educational secondary school. Thorin, who went to state schools like his siblings, like their parents, scoffed at the idea when Dís first told him she was enrolling the boys at the academy. Questioned the cost, argued—quite accurately—that Kíli would never keep his navy blazer clean or his tie straight, scowled at the idea that the education they’d grown up with hadn’t been good enough. “I just want what’s best for them,” Dís said, her tone of voice making it final. Thorin knew his younger sister, her stubbornness and her grit, and he stopped teasing the boys about their uniforms long enough to consider that maybe she was right.

            After the boys leave, Thorin cleans up the kitchen, straightens up the flat. Goes into their room to make their bed, only to find that Fíli has done it already, the corners of the bedsheets tucked in with his mother’s precision. Their room is almost spartanly clean; you would never guess two boys under age 10 live here. Fili might kick over an end-table twice a week, but any cracks are always mended, the fallen lamp always righted. A lingering neatness instilled by Dís combined with Thorin’s own need to make the place not seem like such a crap-heap means that everything is always put away. Organisation means more floor space, more floor space translates into the appearance of a bigger room. It’s a lesson Thorin learned quickly, after moving here. He never kept the barn this neat, scrap wood and plans and personal belongings strewn about the hayloft, half a week’s wardrobe hanging off of various pegs on the main floor. Right about now, he’s wishing he took better care of his clothes; what he has left now are pants wearing thin in the knees, shirts stained with plaster and paint. Laundry is expensive, and new clothes even more so, and what money there is for hygiene goes towards the boys, always. So when Thorin finally gets his shower and trims his beard—a concession to job hunting—it’s a two-day old outfit of dusty canvas workpants and an oil-stained shirt that he puts on. Just before he steps out the door, a hooded parka and his hard hat in his hands, he pauses with his hand on the doorknob and takes a deep breath. Says, as he says every morning, “Get it together, Oakenshield.”

            It’s a quarter to eight by the time he’s heading down to the train station, heavy workboots splashing through puddles from last night’s rain. The construction company is just south of the city center, and while they don’t have any open calls posted along with the roofing job, he figures he can at least go and badger them into letting him join a crew for the next week or so.

            Thorin draws himself up to his full 192cm, squares his shoulders, and enters the company’s main office. “Can I help you?” the young kid working the front desk asks. Thorin knows he’s heard the kid’s name before, something with an O, but it escapes him now.

            “I want to talk to the foreman,” Thorin says. “Is he in the back?”

            “Well, yes, but you can’t—”

            “Right,” Thorin says, and pushes past him.

            “He’s busy!” the kid calls out after him, in vain. “Oh, bother . . .” Thorin ignores him and walks right up to the foreman’s door, knocks twice.

            “What is it?” the man calls out. He sounds aggravated. Wonderful. Thorin pushes the door open and the foreman looks up from a set of blueprints. He’s an older man, gone completely grey and starting to put on weight, but he knows his work and he’s a fair boss. Has never tried to get out of paying Thorin, like some others have. “You again,” the foreman says.

            “I need work,” Thorin says, and closes the door behind him. “You know I’m at least twice as good as anyone you’ve got out there.”

            The boss stares him down.

            “It’s true,” Thorin insists.

            “You know that and I know that,” the boss concedes. “But those men out there have contracts—union contracts, mind you”—he waves a hand out the window overlooking the loading docks—“and if I give you their jobs, I get the board on my arse.”

            “You don’t have to pay me as much as you pay them.”         

            “Lad, you don’t want to be saying that. Your work is top-quality. Don’t sell yourself short, especially not if you need the money.” The man is gracious enough to leave off the pointed addition that Thorin does, in fact, desperately need the money. Thorin grits his teeth.

            “There must be something,” he says. “Anything.” Opts for aiming just short of intimidation: draws his brows together, brings down the corners of his mouth, lays his hands flat on the desk and leans in. He’s found that intimidation doesn’t work with this man, and is, grudgingly, impressed by it, so in return he’s a little more forth-coming, a little more open. But not all the way. The alternative would be, of course, pleading. He’s still a long way off from doing that. When he was younger, just after his mother died, he took care of his siblings with less than he has now; if it comes to it, he’ll just tighten his belt and manage. But to be able to buy Fíli new rugby cleats, or Kíli the next book in that series about the dragon that he loves, that would mean an awful lot. “Anything,” he repeats.

            The boss studies Thorin and then sighs, still not the least bit intimidated. He flips through the memo pad on his desk where he records calls from various contractors looking to hire out projects. His eyes settle on a page; Thorin catches the date of the call, noting that it was just this morning, from the local roofing contractor: the posting he saw online. It’s a bit unusual for the roofers to hire out jobs, Thorin knows, and wonders why they’ve called Durin & Sons. The boss leans back in his chair and scratches his chin. “You seem like a logical man, Oakenshield,” he says. Thorin, confused, says nothing. “Like a man who doesn’t scare easily.”

            “Yeah,” Thorin says, slowly.

            The boss sighs. “All right, lad. There’s a house out West Farthing Way, up in the hills. You ever been out there?”

            “No. I’m new to the area, so . . .”

            “Sure, sure,” the boss nods. “Heard anything about it, though?”

            “No,” Thorin says, beginning to get annoyed. “D’you have a job for me or not?”

            “A fellow out there needs his roof fixed. Chimney, too, and possibly a couple of other things. It should be a one-man job, but it may take some time. If I put these union lunkheads on it, they’ll take even more time, and cost the company twice as much for half the work. To be honest, I thought of you when the call first came in, but . . . Well. Are you up for it?”

            “Yes. Can I start today?”        

            The boss looks unhappy but he says yes, and gets the paperwork started. “It’s not my place to ask,” he says, looking down at his papers instead of at Thorin, “but if you’re in some sort of trouble, there are—”

            “I’m not,” Thorin says quickly, before the man can continue. They’ve been down this road before. “I just need the money.”

            “Fair enough.” The boss hands a folder to Thorin and says, “22 West Farthing Way. Place is called Bywater. Should be easy enough to find. If you run into trouble . . . any trouble, just give us a ring, all right?”

            “Right,” Thorin says, but knows he won’t. The first sign of disinterest from him and four other men will be clamouring for his job. It’s only a roof and a chimney; how hard can it be?

            With the boys already set for the day, between school and Fíli’s youth rugby league practice afterwards—Kíli hangs around and pesters the coaches, or the players on the bench, who grudgingly put up with him because he’s their #2 winger’s younger brother—Thorin has eight hours open ahead of him. At the company’s usual hourly wages, that’s enough to buy nearly a whole week’s worth of dinners. He resists smirking at the front desk kid on his way out but is pleased to have proved him wrong. When he gets outside the rain’s started up again and it’s a wet walk to the train station, back to the flat to pick up his truck.

            The road out of the city proper is a long, winding track, twisting over the highlands. It seems like it should take longer to break out into the hills but Thorin finds himself leaving civilisation behind almost before he realises it, coming up over a rise to look out on rocky fields dotted with damp sheep. “Who the fuck lives out here on this stupid hill?” he mutters, wrenching the steering wheel around a hairpin bend. He has a couple of close calls with dazed sheep in the middle of the road, as if they didn’t have acres of hills to roam; he is driving faster than he should, admittedly, but time is money and his clock doesn’t start until he arrives at the house. At Bywater. “And what kind of arsehole names their house?” The road signs are small, hard to read, if they exist at all. One turn leads him to a dead end and a cluster of stinging nettle that’s overgrown the road; another takes him to a ruined farm cottage. While that is at least interesting, and its roof _does_ need restoring, it’s not what he’s looking for. At last, the sign for West Farthing Way—a narrow piece of wood with an arrow, and small, neat letters painted below—shows itself against a farmer’s stile and Thorin pushes his rusting truck up the hill, tires slipping in mud. The Land Cruiser is a piece of shit, even if one with potential; when Fíli phoned, end of December, his voice tight with worry, to say that Dís was looking really ill and he didn’t know what to do, Thorin just threw his bags into one of the junkers they kept in the barn for hauling furniture and took off. His own car had been out of petrol; stupid, so stupid; how many times, growing up, did his father tell him to fill the tank the moment it got below half? He hasn’t had even a spare weekend to drive down and pick it up since he got here; all his time is spent working, if you can call the crap odd-jobs he finds “work,” or looking for work, or banging his head against a wall trying to figure out how to get the boys to talk to him.

            Because they haven’t talked, to anyone, about it. Have hardly said a word about family since the funeral, when some old distant relative wanted Fíli to give a eulogy and Thorin nearly broke the man’s nose. There was no way in hell he was going to make his nephew stand up there beside his dead mother’s coffin and talk to a crowd of people who’d hardly had anything to do with them since Dís married young and got herself pregnant. That was how they worded it, “got herself,” as if one person was all it took. It was a horrible scandal, of course, because way back when the Oakenshield name used to mean something, apparently, and taking off into the highlands after a man with no money to his name was about as improper as you could get. No matter that Dís’s husband quickly established himself as the head coach of the area’s premiere rugby league and within two years had made enough to buy them a spacious home. Thorin got the sense that their marriage wasn’t precisely a happy one—he hates himself for never properly asking Dís, but how does one ask their younger sister whether or not she really loves her husband and the father of her children? Still, it was a bit of a moot point, as not even six months after Kíli was born the man died in a car crash on his way home from a match. Probably out on these same hills that Thorin is lost in right now.

            He catches a glimpse of Bywater from down in the valley, coming up the approach. The grey stone and dark slate roof blend in with the hillside; more than half the house is shrouded by the landscape until he comes around the final turn in the dirt track and then suddenly it is towering over him, two chimneys and a wavering, peaked roofline. It’s bigger than he thought, and much older. It is also, he recongises in an instant, one of Ernest Gimson’s cottages, or at least someone who studied under him. The lines of the house are unmistakable, even if it is out of Gimson’s usual southeastern territory. He aches to get his hands on it, to be inside its walls, finally something aesthetic after months of working industrial gigs and pouring concrete for Brutalist corporate suites. Perhaps the owner is restoring it; perhaps there are original Arts & Crafts details preserved inside, wallpaper and finishes and mouldings. Or, more likely, given the state of his luck these days, the owner is some horribly pretentious middle-class tosser who wants to gut the place and turn it into a hotel. Thorin lets himself be upset about the hypothetical destruction of history for precisely as long as it takes him to navigate the winding drive and come to a stop at the rear of the house. Then he reminds himself of his situation, of just how precarious it is. It’s money, it’s a job, and you can’t afford to complain. You also can’t afford to fuck it up, so hold your tongue. And yet, and yet . . . there is a feeling, somewhere in his bones, about all of this that he can’t really call excitement. Can’t say what it is, and that inability unnerves him. He never used to be so unsure of himself.

            Shrugging on his parka but leaving the hard hat with his tools in the truck, Thorin walks around the narrow footpath to ring the bell at the front door.


	2. Chapter 2

The rain is letting up but Thorin still feels it on his face, standing at the doorstep and ringing the bell yet again. Waiting there dwarfed by the house, Thorin is struck by how old it is, more than a century, sagging into its foundations as if it wants to become simply another hump in the landscape. There’s a massive slate lintel over the front door that makes him think of a dolmen; the association isn’t a pleasant one. He cranes his neck to look above, trying to spot the problem with the chimney, but the angle’s all wrong. The wall seems to slope outwards, as if it were cantilevered; it’s only perspective, though. It has to be. Thorin rings the bell again. He leans in close to the door, listening for the sound, but it doesn’t come. Disconnected, of course. He spends a good minute knocking on the front door, rainwater dripping down the back of his neck because he forgot to pull his hood up when he first stepped out and now it’s wet anyway, so what’s the point?

            Just as he’s ready to go back to the truck and wait out the rain, Thorin hears running footsteps. There’s a brief silence, and then the door he’s had his ear pressed to is cautiously opened. The man standing in the doorway is a good deal shorter, and younger, than he expected. He takes a step back, so as not to seem too threatening; he can hear Balin’s voice in his head, reminding him, “First impressions for one’s employer are important, after all.” Even if said employer is probably a pampered city boy who’s likely torn up the wallpaper.

            Bilbo, for his part, stares up at Thorin while reminding himself that it’s impolite to stare, and definitely impolite to gape open-mouthed. He’s just surprised: it’s the first time anyone’s come to call since he moved out here. Bywater is so far off the main roads, and hidden in the hills, and it’s not as if he told anyone where he was going when he left. So this strange man standing broad-shouldered and damp on his front doorstep is more than a little bit of a shock. “Can I help you?” he asks. “Are you lost?”

            “This _is_ Bywater, isn’t it?” Thorin asks.

            “Yes, it is.”

            “Thorin Oakenshield, then. Here to fix your roof.”

            “Oh. Oh! Yes, of course, I’m so sorry.” Bilbo laughs and shakes his head, and takes a step back. “Won’t you come in out of the rain?” he asks.

            Thorin glances back at his truck, his tools. He isn’t getting paid to socialise. “Just for a minute,” he says. “I should get to work.”

            “In the rain?” Bilbo asks.

            “You’re new here,” Thorin says; he doesn’t even need to make it a question. “It’s always raining, on and off. You get used to it.” Thorin doesn’t add that he’s been here just over four months and is still not used to it.

            “Even so . . .” Bilbo says. “I insist.”

            The man looks so hesitant, fretting there in the doorway, that Thorin sighs and steps inside. “We can get the contract out of the way, at least.”

            “Yes, of course. And tea? I’ll make tea. Just leave your boots in the hall, if you wouldn’t mind. The kitchen’s ahead there, on the right.” Bilbo disappears down a darkened hallway. Thorin bends to unlace his boots and looks around for a place to hang his dripping parka. Once his eyes adjust to the dim light, he spots a neat row of hooks over a long bench that lines the entryway, holding a succession of potted plants. The wallpaper, he’s more than pleased to see, is a Morris original: Acorn, and still in relatively good shape. There’s a corner just along the doorframe that could use a bit of restoration, but though he knows the patterns, papers and textiles aren’t his area of expertise. He’s already thinking ahead to who he could call, from his old school company. Slow down, he tells himself; You don’t even know this project will hold up. You don’t even know the man’s name.

            His host is bent down in front of the range when Thorin enters the kitchen, and he gets the distinct impression that the man had been swearing not a second before. “Something wrong?” he asks, glancing around, taking in his surroundings: a bowl of fruit on the counter, a stack of unopened letters, kettle and cast-iron pan ready on the stove. The flagstone floors are worn smooth beneath his feet; the windows are dirty. There’s still an oddness about this house that he can’t place, this man is still a stranger, and yet he’s practically aching to put his hands to work on this house, to look and look until he gets his fill of good design. Get it together, Oakenshield. This isn’t a school project, it’s just a job like any other.

            “Ah, no, I just— Just a moment, sorry.” Bilbo rummages in the top drawer of one of the built-in kitchen cabinets. Thorin, following his movements, takes in the details of the intricate moulding, all done by hand. “Have to re-light the pilot,” Bilbo explains, holding up a long box of matches. “It was being so cooperative this morning, too.”

            “You checked your furnace?” Thorin asks.

            “No, I didn’t think that had, er, anything to do with this?”

            Thorin shrugs. “It could. Old houses, old boilers. I can take a look. I mean, if you like.”

            “Tea first,” Bilbo says, as he clicks the gas on and the burner lights. “I’m afraid,” he says, speaking to the kettle, “that I’m going to end up asking an awful lot of you. I really only meant to repair the roof, but now that you’re here, well.” He turns and smiles at Thorin. “It is a very old house.”

            “I’ll see to the roof,” Thorin says. “But I do general repairs, too, so, you know, if you have other work . . .” He lets his voice trail off. He’s still trying to figure out how not to be uncomfortable about asking for work. Somehow it always feels like begging; it leaves a sour taste in his mouth.

            “Are you not with the roofing company?”

            “I work with a construction company,” Thorin hedges. “Sometimes other companies pass their calls along to us, if they’re focusing on other projects at the moment.”

            “I see.” Bilbo takes two tea cups and saucers out of the glassed-in china cabinet and sets them out on the counter. “Oh, sorry, sorry, I didn’t even introduce myself. Where on earth are my manners? Bilbo Baggins. It’s a pleasure,” he says, holding his hand out. Barely a month up here and he’s slipping out of social graces already. His mother would be appalled. It’s rather thrilling, actually.

            “Thorin Oakenshield.” They shake hands, firm grips, one warm and callused, the other cold and smooth.

            “Yes, I didn’t think your name had changed,” Bilbo quips. Thorin gives him a blank look. “Please, make yourself comfortable,” Bilbo says, falling back into childhood manners. There was a time when he was the perfect host; perhaps this is a chance to regain that qualification. He sets the tea to steep and then joins Thorin, who has wondered over to the nook and is looking out at the back fields and the sunken garden. “What do you think?” he asks.

            “Best house I’ve seen in ages,” Thorin says. And then, because he can’t quit while he’s ahead, “What the hell are _you_ doing here, though?” The rain beats gently against the window as each of them stare at the other in stunned silence. “I mean—” Thorin starts out, working through the various ways he might be able to back out of this conversation.

            “I really don’t know,” Bilbo admits.

            “No, never mind, it’s none of my business.”

            “It’s fine. You’re the first one who’s asked me that. I thought you deserved a proper answer.” Bilbo smiles, and slides onto a bench to pour tea. “Come on, sit down. Do they pay you by the hour?”

            “ _You_ pay me by the hour,” Thorin answers.

            “Oh, right, of course. Well then, might as well enjoy it, yes?”

            So they sit and drink tea, and if Bilbo doesn’t want to admit that he’s ridiculously, unexpectedly glad for company of any kind, then Thorin is equally reluctant to say this is the first time he’s had a moment to breathe since moving up here. If he isn’t careful, he’s going to fall asleep right on this table. A very nice table, oak with leaf detail carved up its legs. He fingers the joining surreptitiously, noting how smooth everything is, and how tightly it’s still holding together despite the years. It’s the sort of thing he used to make, or dream of making. His throat goes tight and he takes a sip of his tea.

            The room has fallen quiet, neither knowing what to say. Bilbo studies Thorin, while Thorin studies his table. Wonders what sort of thoughts run through the head of a man like that, someone who drives a truck with a rusted-out door panel, who has brought smells of cigarette smoke and coffee into Bilbo’s tidy kitchen. Well, he thinks, not that he’s one to talk at the moment, covered in dust from the attic. He’d been trying to uncover some more of the furniture, looking for something to drag down into the front drawing room to set before the window, a place to sit—theoretically—while composing a drawing room play. If he were ever to write anything that might actually make money, that is. Can’t rely on the Baggins family name forever.

            “I’ll go up to the roof now,” Thorin announces, pushing his chair back, and Bilbo blinks a couple of times to re-focus. “Where’s the leak?”

            “Above the attic,” Bilbo says.

            “Yes, I figured that much,” Thorin replies, aiming for patience but falling short. “Where, exactly? You _have_ found it, right? Or is it the whole roof?”

            “No, sorry, right,” Bilbo says, completely unhelpful. “I can show you, from the attic. I haven’t exactly been up on the roof to have a look around.”

            Thorin huffs a laugh and brings his cup over the sink. He’s about to start washing up when a gentle hand on his wrist stops him. “Leave it,” Bilbo says, “leave it. I’ll do it later. I’m paying you to fix my roof, not do my dishes. I can actually do that.” And he leads Thorin further into the house, down another dim hallway—do none of the lights in this house work?—and up two flights of stairs, and then to a narrow door at the end of the hallway. Though the ceilings on the first floor were impressively high, they’ve been getting lower as they climb. Here on the third level, Thorin’s head nearly brushes the ceiling. He has to duck as they go up into the eaves. Bilbo finds the dangling chain for the attic light and pulls, casting a yellow glow across the long cluttered space. The attic, unexpectedly, runs the full width of the south side of the house; Thorin had been expecting just a bit of storage space, not this maze of dropcloth-covered furniture and God knows what else. Bilbo leads him across the narrow bit of open floor, skirting a battered luggage set, and they come to stand under an oilskin tarp that’s dripping steadily into a nearly-filled bucket.

             “Hmm,” Thorin says, staring up at Bilbo’s shoddy repair work. He scans the room, notes the placement of the central beams. “Need to see it from the outside,” he says, one hand on a ceiling joist, “but I think I can tell where the problem is. Might have to order the slate. Unless you have any on hand?”

            Bilbo just laughs. “I only moved in last month. For all I know, there’s an entire quarry in the cellar, though I doubt it. Actually, I doubt if there is a cellar. Haven’t found one yet.”

            “Do you, er, do you at least have a ladder?” Thorin asks, because he’s been stupid and hasn’t brought one. Still, the corner of roof over the house’s south side is low enough to the rise of the hill that he thinks he could probably climb up.

            “Yes, it’s in the shed. I can get it for you.”

            “I’ll get it. It’s my job.” Thorin pauses, like he wants to say something else, only he has no idea what that might be. So he gives Bilbo a nod and heads back downstairs. The halls seem somehow slanted, even though he’s sure they’re not, and when he turns left to find the staircase to the ground level he ends up facing a spare bedroom instead. Everything is so dark, between the rich colours of the wallpaper and the lack of proper lighting. Thorin doesn’t even want to think about redoing the electrical wiring on this house, though; the designers of the Arts & Crafts movement may have had elegant aesthetics, but any electrical engineering done in Bywater is probably an after-thought, part of some ill-conceived renovation project by a former owner. He wonders if Bilbo’s having electricians in. It really isn’t his expertise, but surely if he got Fíli to take out a few books from his school’s library, Thorin could learn. More tasks to do meant more money; work, work, work, goes the chant at the back of his mind. Secondary school libraries have books on electrical engineering, right?

            The shed is rotting to bits, slanting over sideways against the stone wall that lines a portion of the garden. Thorin opens the door slowly, afraid that it’s going to fall apart. He pulls a torch out of the pocket of his parka and clicks it on, scanning the cobwebbed interior. A rusted push-reel lawnmower, tin paint cans, gardening tools, and a wooden ladder lying across the shed floor that has definitely seen better days. Still, it will do well enough for getting him up onto the roof. He pockets his torch again and drags the ladder out, kicks the shed door shut behind him, remembering a second too late to be gentle with it. The building sways, but doesn’t fall.

            While Thorin is up on the roof, Bilbo continues his puttering about the attic. He empties the bucket into the second floor bath and then replaces it and takes down the tarp. The sky is lighter now, as if the sun’s trying to break through, and he can just make out a patch of thin cloud through a gap in the slate tiles. There’s an old rolltop desk tucked away in the corner that he’s been meaning to take a look at, and now seems as good a time as any. Picking his way through the clutter, Bilbo keeps an ear attuned to the slow, careful footfalls coming from the roof above him. They come to a halt just behind Bilbo. A shower of dust falls onto his head.

            “All right up there?” he calls out.

            “Found the break,” Thorin calls back, his voice muffled by wood and stone. “Old slate, breaks easily. Can patch it up for you but I’ll have to order more.”

            “Sure, sure, that’s fine,” Bilbo calls back. Thorin walks around over his head a bit more, and then Bilbo hears scraping, hammering, enough noise to figure that Thorin knows what he’s doing. So Bilbo gets back to his pursuit of the desk. The rolltop itself is locked, but just last week Bilbo found a ring of keys that had fallen—or was hidden, perhaps for a reason—behind a row of books on one of the parlour shelves and he’s eager to try it out. The lock is tarnished brass, delicately shaped, and Bilbo finds the corresponding key, small and warm in his hand. This is the first thing in the house that has been obviously locked away, and he wants to know why. The desk caught his eye the very first time he came up into the attic, even amid a face-full of cobwebs and a lingering uncertainty about his decision to purchase the house. Slotted into the corner there across the room, it seemed to be waiting for him. Holding his breath, Bilbo turns the key in the lock and lifts the lid. There’s a brief scuffle and some protracted muttering from the roof but Bilbo is too distracted by the allure of a secret.

            Thorin, outside on the roof, misses his step and slides halfway down, catches himself with an arm flung out to grab the rough-hewn stone of the chimney. The slate is slick with rain, and the treads of his boots are worn out; cursing himself for his carelessness, Thorin picks his way back up to the place where the slate tiles have cracked. He’s never fallen off a roof before, and now isn’t the time to start. He sets about pulling up the broken tiles, making enough of a gap that he can actually see down into the attic, through the moss-covered wood. The broken pieces he piles neatly by his side in a feat of balance—they’ll be useful for matching the colour when he goes to order new ones, and for patching any future gaps. From his kneeling position, the angle is just right to catch a glimpse of Bilbo’s dusty head bent down over a desk. This is the first job Thorin’s ever worked where the client hung around the same room as him. Although, he supposes, technically it’s not the same room. Still, the company, however distant and preoccupied it may be, is almost nice. Almost.

            Bilbo lets his breath out in a single push, clearing what little dust there is off the flat surface of the desk. There’s a row of narrow shelving, and three drawers. The first holds a letter opener and a stack of correspondence, heavy paper and wax seals and flowing cursive, exactly the sort of thing you would expect in this kind of desk. Bilbo goes to pick up the bundle of letters and they crumble away beneath his fingertips, attic heat and moisture having joined the decaying work of old age. If he comes back with gloves, Bilbo thinks, and perhaps a better light, he might be able to salvage something, so he eases the drawer shut and moves onto the next one. Only bits of string and a couple of marbles, a dried-out fountain pen. The last drawer sticks when Bilbo tugs on its handle, and he nearly overbalances before pulling it free. At first he thinks it’s empty. Then a gleam of light, let through by a passing cloud, catches on something in the back of the drawer. Bilbo reaches a hand in, gropes around blindly, and feels cool metal, smooth and round. It’s a ring, a plain golden band. There’s nothing else. Bilbo turns it over in his hands a few times, shifting his footing to see it in a better light. It’s simple enough, but intriguing: To whom did it belong, and how did it end up in a desk drawer? Bilbo reminds himself, yet again, to look into the history of his house. For the time being, and for lack of any better place of safe-keeping, he slides the ring onto a finger. It looks a little foolish, with his rumpled cotton shirt and his old jeans, the ones that are slightly too tight and have a hole in the left knee. It also looks a little like he’s married, and Bilbo quickly moves it from his ring-finger to the middle, which turns out to be a better fit anyway.

            For the better part of the morning they stay like that, Thorin walking around up on the roof, testing for loose tiles and noting that Bywater’s corroded copper gutters are long overdue for at least a good cleaning, if not outright replacement, while Bilbo putters about the attic, uncovering a collection of yellowing portraits in ornate frames and a series of cloth-bound books he sets aside for later perusal, perhaps over tea. Tea: the moment he thinks it, Bilbo is fantastically hungry. He doesn’t wear a watch these days, and has to go down into the study to check the time. It’s half past two. “Thorin?” he calls out, climbing back up into the attic. “Are you all right up there?”

            “Fine,” Thorin calls back.

            “I’m starving, aren’t you? Come inside and have something to eat.”

            “I’m looking at your rear chimney right now.”

            “It can wait. I’ll be in the kitchen.”

            Thorin, braced in a low crouch on the east side of the house, just below the jut of the chimney, shakes his head. He’s done as much as he can to patch the roof—certainly better than a tarp and a bucket—but he wants to figure out what exactly is wrong with the chimney, apart from some structural faults in the stone. There isn’t time to be loafing about on lunch break; he’s not getting paid to eat lunch, no matter how lenient his employer seems to be, which is precisely why he never bothers packing any. A flask of bitter coffee and half a pack of cigarettes are waiting in his truck, but he kind of doubts that’s what Bilbo had in mind when he said, “Come inside.” If the man hadn’t already insisted on making him tea—really excellent tea, frankly, and he doesn’t even _like_ tea—Thorin would suspect he joking. But the offer is clearly a serious one, serious enough that when another ten minutes have passed and Thorin is sifting through the back of his truck for materials to build a brace for the chimney Bilbo comes out and taps him on the shoulder.

            “Come in and eat,” he says. “Won’t you?”

            Thorin studies Bilbo, this man, his employer, who lives on his own in a house far too large for any one person let alone a person as small as he is, a good head and more shorter than Thorin, in a fine but rumpled button-down that probably cost more than Thorin’s made in the past month. He wants, badly, to dislike him, or at least to resent him. To look into those blue-green eyes and scowl, as he usually does, and turn away and go about his business. There are a great deal of people in this world, and he, typically, hates almost all of them. So it can’t be Bilbo that’s giving him pause, which means it must be the house: Bywater, a relic of the last century, a space that breathes dusty echoes of Thorin’s former life, all of his aspirations gathered together into a twisting groundplan of dimly lit rooms and unevenly pitched rooftops. There is something about it that he hasn’t yet figured out, something tugging at the corners of his consciousness, saying, I’m here, I’m here, if you would only look. Look hard and look twice. “Yeah, all right,” Thorin says, and pushes himself out of the truck, dusts off his pants. All right; I’ll look, just for a little while longer.

            The kitchen windows look out onto the slope of hills, fog hugging the mountainsides and lying low in the valley. Under a fine mist, everything is grey-green, grasses and hedgerows and fields all blending together, the city just a blur on the horizon line. Thorin washes up in the kitchen sink while Bilbo pours them each a glass of lemonade and carries more food than is strictly necessary over to the table in the nook. Plates of cold chicken and cheeses, a basket of bread that looks homemade, tomatoes and greens and olives heaped in a bowl. “I’d offer you wine,” Bilbo is saying, as Thorin tries not to gape, “but I worry that you’d fall off my roof.”

            “Right,” Thorin says, “no,” and swallows, feeling a tightening in his stomach that has nothing to do with the fact that he’s almost already fallen off the roof.

            “I’d also invited you into the dining room proper, but I’m afraid it’s a bit unfinished.”

            “Uh, no, it’s fine,” Thorin says. “This is fine.” He slides into a seat on the bench, pale sunlight warm on his back through the windows.

            Bilbo smiles at him. “Here, then, pass your plate,” he says, and proceeds to serve Thorin nearly a week’s worth of food. Thorin just stares at it for a second, blinking, before he accepts it. “Thanks for all your help,” Bilbo is saying, cutting his chicken into neat strips. Thorin shakes his head, and tears his gaze away from the feast to look his employer in the eye.

            “This is . . . You didn’t have to do this.”

            Bilbo waves his words away. “To be honest, I’m not used to eating alone. So you can just think of it as doing me a favour.”

            A favour. Right. Thorin makes himself drink a full glass of water before he starts to eat. The last thing he needs right now is to make himself sick by eating too much, too quickly. The food is delicious, easily the best meal he’s had since coming up here. Tomatoes have never been his favourites but these are juicy and sweet, golden yellow, tangy against the richness of the cheese.

            “So, what’s the plan, Thorin?” Bilbo asks. “How do things look up there?”

            This, at least, is a conversation in which Thorin can hold his own. He’s talked to countless clients over the years, even if he’s never enjoyed it the way some of the others from his school did. This is just another job. “Like I said, we’ll need to order the slate. It looks local, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find. I’ll build a brace for the chimney, but I think it needs more comprehensive structural work to really be sound,” Thorin says, hedging, once again, trying to make himself an opening for the future. And then, because it’s the first thing he’s been genuinely curious about in weeks, he can’t help asking, “You know the history of this house?”

            “No. When I said I didn’t know what I was doing here, I meant that in many ways. I didn’t come up here intending to buy a house, and now that I have . . .” Bilbo sweeps his hands out, and shrugs. “I’m looking into it. There has to be someone around here who knows. It would be fantastic to see it the way it was meant to be, however many years ago.”

            “Probably close to a century, if not a little more.”

            “Really? How can you tell?”

            “It’s a—” Thorin breaks off; this is usually where he’d leave the conversation to strictly business. But with a stomach full of chicken and bread, and the softness of the bench cushion against his weary back, his defenses are down. “Studied this style of architecture in school,” he says, rubbing his neck, his sore shoulder. “If it’s not one of Gimson’s cottages, it’s very close. He was working around the turn of the century.”

            “Gimson,” Bilbo repeats. “I’ll look into him. That’s wonderful, I had no idea you were familiar with all this.”

            “I mean, it’s probably not Gimson, this far north. But similar.”

            “A starting point, at least.”

            “If you’re looking to restore the house,” Thorin starts, tentatively.

            “Yes, definitely,” Bilbo says. “Well, I came up here to do some writing, to be honest, but I think I need a good distraction. This company you work for, would they be willing to let you take this on as a larger project? I know I initially asked about just the roof and the chimney, but considering that this does seem to be in your area of expertise, the opportunity does present itself, don’t you think?”

            “It’s not a problem,” Thorin says quickly. “I’ll do it.”

            “Oh, that’s great. Do I need to fill out a contract, or—”

            “We can just work it out between us,” Thorin says, which is definitely not the way that things are done, but why not cut out the middle-man? Even if Durin & Sons has been good to him in the past, it’s no guarantee that will continue. Bilbo has his head cocked to one side, as if he’s considering, or possibly suspicious. Thorin backtracks hastily. “If you want to save paperwork, I mean. It’s fine, if you’d rather not.” The last thing he needs is for anyone to file a report about him.

            “No, no,” Bilbo says, his smile returned, “that would be a lot simpler. And that is what I came out here for: simplicity. Or, something like that.” Bilbo laughs a little, and stabs his fork neatly through a tomato. “What are your usual wages? I’m sorry to ask, it’s very rude, I’m sure, but I really have no idea.”

            Thorin has a quick inner debate: the chance to lie, and ask more, is so desperately tempting, and normally he wouldn’t even hesitate. He would have, once; would never even have considered it. But his honesty had been one of the first things to go after Dís’s death. And yet the words won’t come, not to Bilbo, looking up at him bright-eyed from across the table. Thorin clears his throat. “Minimum,” he says, honestly.

            “Right,” Bilbo says. “And that is . . . ?”

            It takes Thorin a second to realise what Bilbo asking, and what it means. What sort of family Bilbo must be from, not to know what minimum wage is, never to have worked a low-paying job. To have come up here and purchased a house on a whim, apparently, and afford it and repairs and still not hold down a job, because whatever writing Bilbo has planned, Thorin doubts it’s the kind that pays the bills. “Six pounds thirty-one,” he says, and tries to keep the sudden flare of anger out of his voice. It’s not Bilbo’s fault he’s well-off, and it’s precisely that wealth that’s going to be putting food on Thorin’s table, and he should really learn to stop being so surprised by how unfair the world is.

            “Oh,” Bilbo says, and swallows dryly. “Oh, that’s—that’s less than I was expecting.”

            They finish their food in silence, the mood turned tense. There’s at least enough food left to feed three. Thorin tries, once again, to help clear up, but Bilbo waves him outside with a distracted air so Thorin goes back to his truck. He kind of wants a cigarette, to clear his head, but it seems a waste after such a nice meal. The rain starts up again, soft and cool, and Thorin pulls his parka hood up over the hardhat and climbs back up onto the roof. It’s not that he’s ashamed, exactly, of the kind of life he’s living. But when he gave up his honesty he clung stubbornly to his pride, and he hasn’t yet figured out how to react to people learning exactly how precarious his finances are, particularly when those people are as kind as Bilbo seems to be. It’s easier if they’re rude: they sneer, he sneers right back, everyone’s equally disgusted. But this is a much more difficult situation to navigate. Thorin thinks, balancing on one knee as he tacks a cross-brace onto the scaffolding he’s building, that he could have handled that better.

            Bilbo stays out of sight for the rest of the afternoon. By the time Thorin has the chimney suitably braced and his tools gathered up, it’s nearly four-thirty in the afternoon. His watch battery died last week and he hasn’t had the chance to replace it yet; that is his excuse. Seeing the time on the truck’s dashboard clock still makes him swear. Fíli will be done with rugby practice in five minutes, give or take, and he and Kíli will be back home in twenty. “Er, Bilbo?” Thorin calls out, poking his head into the entryway. “I have to go.”

            “Is everything all right?” Bilbo asks, emerging from the drawing room, a battered book in his hands.

            “Yeah, fine, I just— I lost track of the time. Have somewhere to be.”

            “Can you come back tomorrow?”

            “Uh, sure, but I need to go now, so . . .” Needed to go half an hour ago, really.

            “Of course,” Bilbo says. “You can come and go as you please, Thorin. It’s only me here, and I’m usually at home. Let me just get you your pay.” He disappears into the kitchen and comes back with a large paper bag and an envelope.

            “What’s that?” Thorin asks.

            “Pay,” Bilbo says, and ushers him towards the door. “See you tomorrow, Thorin!”

            Thorin is torn between curiosity—what on earth is in such a large bag?—and urgency, and manages a quick, “Right, yeah, thanks,” before ducking out. The front path up to his truck is slippery but he takes it at a run, throws himself into the truck and speeds off down the lane, sending sheep skittering out of the way. He doesn’t look back to see Bilbo standing on the rise of the lawn, waving him off. It’s half an hour’s drive, nearly, back into the city. By the time he pulls into the back lot of the flat, the boys are surely home. He climbs the stairs up to the building's third level, steeling himself for what’s likely to be a cold reception, trying to figure out what the hell they’re going to do about dinner.

 

Fíli and Kíli are at the kitchen table doing schoolwork when Thorin walks in. They look up, but don’t say a word. Fíli’s keys are hanging on the hook by the door, as if Thorin needed a reminder that he has let his nephews become latchkey kids. This is not the life their mother wanted for them, he knows; he knows, and everyone can stop telling him about it. “How was practice?” Thorin asks. After the first week of saying so every night, he’s given up apologising for being late. Asking about rugby league seems like the next best thing.

            Fíli shrugs. Kíli pushes aside his exercise book and twists in his chair to look at Thorin. “Fíli punched a boy in the face,” he says, and Thorin has to stare at him for a second before figuring out that it’s pride that made Kíli talk, not the chance to tell tales. The kid is actually smiling about it. Thorin switches on the hall light and looks Fíli over, top to bottom. There’s a slight bruise spreading over his right cheek.

            “I told you not to say anything!” Fíli says, rounding on his younger brother, who shrinks back a little. “It’s not a big deal.”

            “What happened, Fíli?” Thorin asks. He sets the bag from Bilbo on the counter and waits.

            “It’s not like you can tell me not to punch people,” Fíli says, glaring, though his gaze is focused on his maths and not his uncle. “You’ve done it.”

            Rather than admit that Fíli’s right, Thorin just asks, “Do you want to tell me why you punched him?”

            “He deserved it.” Fíli scrunches up his paper and shoves it towards the wall. Kíli is nodding, not helping.

            “Kíli, give us a minute,” Thorin says, pressing his fingers to the bridge of his nose.

            “But I—”

            “Now, Kíli. Go . . . water your plant or something.” Thorin leans back against the counter and rubs a hand across his face. He’s damp and aching, wants a hot shower and some sleep. Kíli hesitates, but his older brother gives him a gentle push towards the hall. He’s been trying to grow a seedling in a little plastic pot, a school project that seems like an exercise in futility to Thorin, but it keeps the kid happy. Or, close enough. “What happened?” Thorin asks Fíli again, when they’re alone.

            “He was being an arse.”

            “That’s not enough of a reason. Did he hit you first?”

            “He was making fun of Kíli,” Fíli says, not answering. “I told him to stop, and he didn’t, so I hit him. Then he stopped.”

            “Fíli,” Thorin says, and tries to figure out how to scold the boy for doing exactly what he would have done.

            “It’s not fair!” Fíli shouts, turning in his chair to gesture angrily. “I never did anything to him but he’s _always_ shoving me around and I swear I never hit him before but he—”

            “Fíli, it’s all right.”

            “. . . What?”

            “I’m not angry. Not with you. You stuck up for your brother.” Fíli is staring at Thorin like he can’t quite believe what’s happening. Thorin just sighs, and adds, “Try not to hit him again, yeah?”

            “Yeah, all right,” Fíli says, after a minute. He deflates right before Thorin’s eyes.

            “Are you hurt?”

            “I’m fine,” Fíli says. Thorin raises an eyebrow. Fíli rubs his nose—his knuckles are split, Thorin notices. “It’s not a big deal, honest.”

            “Let me see your hand.” Thorin takes his nephew’s hand, turns it over, presses gingerly along the bones. Fíli tenses and inhales sharply. Well, fuck, Thorin thinks, and brings his free hand up to rest on Fíli’s head. “Nothing’s broken,” he says. “And your face? Did you ice it?”

            Fíli shakes his head. “Coach wanted me to, but I just . . . I just wanted to get Kíli home.”

            Thorin goes to the freezer and takes out an icepack, wraps it in a towel. Rugby, even youth league, is a contact sport; this isn’t the first time Fíli’s come back to the apartment with bruises. It is the first time, though, that those bruises weren’t received on the pitch. Thorin sits down next to Fíli at the kitchen table and, after glancing at the boy for confirmation, leans in and holds the icepack gently to the side of Fíli’s face.

            Fíli winces at the cold and bites his lip. “You’re really not angry? Mum would’ve been furious.”

            It always catches Thorin unawares when either of the boys mentions Dís. It’s never with any frequency, always in passing, and he doesn’t know whether it’s their way of gradually acknowledging the way things are now, or some kind of mental slip. “She would’ve been,” he says. “But she’d understand, too. Someone gives you a hard time once, you tell them to stop. They do it again, you tell one of your teachers, or your coach. They do it a third time, you hit ‘em. They hit you first, you hit back, twice as hard. That’s how we grew up, your mum and . . . and I.” He almost mentions Frerin, but that’s a whole other center of grief he’s not ready to discuss, certainly not with the boys who didn’t even know him and who have known more than enough death already.

            “I don’t think he’ll bother me again,” Fíli says, and can’t quite contain his smugness. “His nose was bleeding. A lot.”

            Thorin refrains, admirably, from offering any congratulations. “If he gives you any more trouble, I want you to tell me,” he says.

            “Why? What’re you going to do? I can handle it.”

            “You can, yeah. But I still want to know.”

            “Fine.”

            “Good.”

            They sit at the kitchen table in silence for exactly two minutes before Kíli comes back and leans against the wall, as if they can’t see him. “Get in here, you,” Thorin says. Kíli comes and leans against the table—they only have two chairs—and grins. “All right?” Thorin asks. Kíli nods, brightly. “This boy says anything to you again, you tell me.”

            “I can fight him, too!”

            “No!” Thorin says, and doesn’t mean to shout but kind of does it anyway. Under his cold hand, Fíli flinches. “Damn it,” Thorin breathes, and wants to knock his head against the wall. “I don’t want you to get hurt, Kíli, that’s all.” Or sent to the headmaster’s office, or find himself in enough trouble that the school actually sends someone over to talk to Thorin. The possibilities are endless and all bad.

            “I said I would handle it,” Fíli says. “And I will.” He looks at Thorin, his gaze for an instant so much like Frerin’s that Thorin is certain he’s seeing his brother. This has always been one of his problems with Fíli: he doesn’t know how to talk to this boy who looks so much like someone he so desperately wants not to be dead. It never changes anything, and yet he goes on wanting. Sometimes Thorin cracks the door open while the boys are asleep and just watches, two heads, the younger dark, the older fair. It’s the reverse of him and Frerin. But his family has always gone in cycles. This time around, the pattern just got confused.

            “I can hold the ice,” Kíli says, and Thorin motions him over, lets the boy take the towel and the chair. He goes to the counter, opens up the paper bag. Bilbo’s paper bag. His mind is on dinner, running through a catalogue of the contents of their cupboards and refrigerator—two tins of beans, half a box of crackers, curry powder, milk, four eggs, some slightly stale bread—and trying to figure out what he’s going to scrape together, taking things out of the bag automatically. It only registers when he’s lifting out a container of pulled chicken that Bilbo has sent him back with a pile of food, and an envelope far too fat to contain only minimum wages.

            Thorin’s still standing there, dumbfounded, when Fíli asks, hesitant, “Is that . . . dinner?”

            “Yeah,” Thorin says, and clears his throat. “Fíli, can you set the table? I’ll just be a minute.” He checks to make sure he’s emptied the bag, folds it neatly, and then steps outside with it tucked under his arm. Leaning back against the bland hallway wall, Thorin closes his eyes and breathes out to a count of ten. He wants a cigarette. He wants to phone Bilbo and ask him what the hell he thinks he’s doing, tell him that the Oakenshields aren’t some charity case, that he can fuck off and take his tomatoes with him. But he doesn’t have Bilbo’s number—and since when did he start calling strangers by their given names in his head, anyway?—and no matter how much he hates it, how it hurts his pride, he can’t deny that the boys deserve better food than what he’s been managing. They _need_ better food. He does, too. He hasn’t said anything, not that there’s anyone around to tell, but one of the reasons he keeps his beard shorter these days is that it’s started to wear thin and patchy. He woke up one morning to dark hair on his pillow and took the scissors to his chin over the bathroom sink. Protein, iron, vitamins. He swallows his pride, no matter how bitter the taste, and goes back inside.

            Fíli and Kíli have laid out the food on the counter, two plates at the table and one atop the stove, where Thorin usually leans. They’re looking at him wide-eyed, obviously wanting to ask him what’s happened, but keep shooting glances at the bounty before them, too. “Go on,” Thorin says, and if his voice is hoarse they don’t mention it. Just load their plates up with things they haven’t eaten in weeks: green beans, fresh bread, cheese. Thorin knows he should tell them to eat slowly, to remember to chew or they’ll make themselves sick, but to say as much would be to admit it, out loud, that he’s failed to provide for them. So he says nothing, and takes a bite of cheese, just a small one, savouring it against his tongue.

            “Where did you get this?” Fíli asks, when he’s eaten a drumstick and a wing and at least six of the small, ripe tomatoes. That’s the other thing with Fíli: he’s old enough to ask precisely the kinds of questions Thorin never wants to answer. Kíli is content to munch on what looks to be an entire chicken breast, cutlery forgotten in favour of his fingers. Content to eat whatever you put in front of him, really, whether it’s strictly edible or not.

            “Started a new job today,” Thorin says, and leaves the rest for Fíli to connect on his own. Before another question can come up, he says, “So, rugby. When’s your match?”

            Fíli shoots him a look that says he knows what Thorin’s doing, by avoiding the question, but only says, “Friday next. Why?”

            “Thought I might come.”

            “You never come.”

            “I want to go!” Kíli says. “I only ever get to watch practice, it isn’t fair.”

            “It’s the same thing,” Fíli says.

            “No, it’s not.”

            “Is, too.”

            “No!”

            “You don’t know anything, Kí, so shut it. Life’s not fair!”

            “Knock it off, you two,” Thorin says, and hopes that Kíli doesn’t start crying. “Finish your dinner, and then get cleaned up and into bed.” So he’s never claimed to be the best at parenting; so he forgets, sometimes, how much he and Frerin used to bicker at each other when they were young. Fíli frowns, the goodwill from just a moment ago forgotten. He chews his dinner sullenly and sulks off into the shower when he’s finished. Kíli pokes a finger into the container of blueberry crumble and licks it clean, lingers and pouts in Thorin’s direction for a while before disappearing into the bedroom. Thorin knocks his head back against the cupboards, twice, three times, and then sets about putting the leftover food away and cleaning up the kitchen. “Trying is only half the battle,” Dis used to say, when they were younger and Thorin wasn’t speaking to their father; “The other half is following through.”


	3. Chapter 3

Bilbo wakes at Bywater on Saturday and throws off his quilts. With sunlight—actual sunlight, not  just the wan aspirations that have fought their way through the clouds these past weeks—streaming in through the wide window at the foot of the bed, his room is warm and still. Squinting against the light, he throws open the windows and waits for the inevitable cool breeze. It doesn’t come. April has started the turn into summer. The birds are loud in the hedgerows of the garden, and though the smell of rain lingers, the grey-green fields are dry, not glistening with dew. The brightness of it all, the clarity, makes Bilbo’s head hurt. His mouth is dry; his limbs are heavy.

            He was up until the early hours of the morning writing, the words coming more quickly to his mind than they have in a long time. This house, it seems, is doing exactly what he had wanted after all. Stretching, catching his balance with a hand along the walls, Bilbo pads across the hall to the upstairs study. He needs to reassure himself that he actually wrote all those pages last night. And they are there, stacked neatly beside the typewriter—if he wasn’t so firm in his own rules, he would pick one up and read it. But that isn’t how he works. The beauty of a typewriter, rather than a computer, is that he can’t just scroll up to read his previous day’s work, doesn’t always have that temptation lying around. He simply gathers the pages and slips them into a folder, shuts it in a desk drawer each morning. It’s progress, he tells himself; No use undermining it by looking backwards. He’s having a hard enough time getting through this story as it is. Still, he can’t help but notice that the stack in his hands is thicker than it usually is, even for a good night. Thicker than he remembers it being, last night when he went to bed. Or was it this morning? Did he go to bed at all, even? Sneaking a glance at the bottom page, Bilbo notes the chapter heading: six.

            “Could have sworn I stopped at four,” Bilbo says to himself, his voice quiet in the empty room. “Hmm.” The words on the page aren’t familiar; he doesn’t remember writing this. But that’s ridiculous. Of course he did, it’s his own typewriter that the pages have come from, with the distinctive smudge on the capital F that he keeps meaning to fix, putting it off only because he doesn’t actually start that many sentences with the letter F and it seems like more of a bother to fix it than to leave it alone. He’s just tired, that’s all. And overly warm. It had been cold enough for a sweater and two pairs of socks last night, and now he’s stripping his shirt off and opening the study windows.

            The ground level is cooler than upstairs, the walls half-built into the hill retaining the coolness of the underground. Bilbo puts the kettle on for tea and opens the door to the sunroom built off the back of the house. He’s been meaning to start a vegetable garden there, get the plants far enough along that they’ll survive the move outside. The air in the glassed-in room is stifling. Bilbo has to catch himself with a hand against the doorframe, taken aback at the heat, the cloying smell of what must be rotting wood. Pressing a hand over his mouth, Bilbo shuts the door and leans back against it. When did the seasons change so fast? When did the morning sun grow so bright? The kettle whistles and Bilbo pulls it off the stove. The kitchen clock tells him it’s two in the afternoon.

            He sits in the nook and drinks his tea. Fiddles with the golden ring, still on the middle finger of his left hand. It’s not as though it’s the first time he’s slept in well past when he meant to. Not the first time he’s been up writing all night. And besides, isn’t that part of living out here, not being accountable to anyone’s schedule but his own? A shower, Bilbo decides; a shower, and then a proper breakfast, and then he’ll see to the sunroom. A good airing out, a bottle of vinegar and some baking soda, lemon polish for the floors. Water must have gotten in, sitting stagnant in a pool somewhere, probably spawning algae—hence the smell. All he needs to do is air it out, clean it up a bit. Whatever wood has actually rotted can be replaced. It may take him a while, but he’ll sort out this house. A hundred years of history, all his now. The only thing, really, that he can call his own, and surely that’s deserving of his attention. As soon as he can get his mind to catch up, that is.

            The upstairs bath looks out over the sunken garden, crumbling stone walls covered in ivy, a hawthorn tree laden with blossoms, its branches grown wild. Wild cherry, too, and Bilbo keeps meaning to see about gathering its fruit. He found a guide to the regional flora on one of the bookshelves in the back parlour and has been paging through it a little each day, comparing its sketches to the landscape visible from his windows. One of these days he’ll actually go out and walk the hills, too. It’s seemed more important to focus on the house first, on its sloping walls and dark hallways, on figuring out how it works. He’s searched the bookshelves for something on the house’s history and come up short; even the realtor didn’t have much to say about it. Gimson, Thorin had said, and Bilbo reminds himself, lathering up his hair, to look into that name.

            He’s standing in front of the mirror, a towel wrapped around his waist, debating whether or not he needs a haircut, when the noise comes. The same knocking sound that has been in his dreams, these past few nights, a tapping against the walls. At first Bilbo thought that a bird had gotten into the attic, or the chimney flue. When his searches turned up nothing, he chalked it up to being over-tired, and having an active imagination. The noise returned, a light _tap-tap_ against the windows, the walls, as he tossed and turned in bed just last night. Or was it the night before? And this time the noise is slightly different: a grating, scraping sound follows the knocking. Tense, one hand on his towel, Bilbo pokes his head out of the bath. The hallway is empty. Nothing moving. He draws back into the bath and the noise grows louder, until a single, solid thump. Leaning out the window Bilbo can see a dark head and broad shoulders, wrestling with scaffolding against the back of the house. Thorin—of course it’s Thorin, he said he would come tomorrow, and now it’s tomorrow, so he’s here. Bilbo laughs at himself when he catches his reflection in the mirror, and goes out into the bedroom to dress.

            The roofline is higher at the back of the house, but the ground levels out: it’s a trade-off Thorin has to make, in order to secure the scaffolding. He’s borrowed the materials from Durin & Sons, an indefinite loan from the foreman, who gave him a very strange look when Thorin stopped by this morning to say that he’d be continuing the job, and would need a supply catalogue to order materials. “You sure about that?” he asked. “How’d it go yesterday?” “Fine,” Thorin said, and didn’t tell the boss that he’s been paid already, in cash, and won’t be filing a contract with the kid at the front desk. The boss will certainly find out, and probably sooner rather than later, but Thorin figures he can deal with that when it comes up, when he’ll have a little more money in his pocket. A little more weight to throw around in the bargain.

            He’s standing on the lawn and craning his neck to look upwards. The peak of the roof rises over a broad window, a hint of the back chimney just visible beyond. Thorin’s already been up on the roof today, checking on the chimney brace to make sure it lasted the night’s storm. Fíli and Kíli were still sleeping when he left in the morning. No school today, and no practice either, and he feels guilty for leaving them on their own all day but Bilbo had asked him to come back. Despite that, there was no answer when Thorin knocked on the door, not even bothering with the broken doorbell, and so he figured he may as well get to work; Bilbo would be out soon enough, no doubt. That was six hours ago. He heard the water running, briefly, a moment ago, but now all is silent, apart from the first crickets of the season, hidden somewhere in the high grass.

            The barn was always filled with music during the workday, a rotating cycle of genres over the ridiculously heavy speakers they’d rigged up on either side of the main doors, someone always humming along. Thorin, often, hummed along. He works in silence now, noticing the buzz of the crickets, the call of gulls resounding across the heath—they’re not far from the sea, twelve or fifteen  kilometers at most, and the birds range far. The sun is warm on the back of his neck, a rare clear-weather day, perfect for scrabbling around on a roof of slick slate. He’s two steps up the scaffolding when Bilbo comes up behind him and says, “Hello?” and Thorin nearly falls off in shock, wrenching his arm as he catches himself. Same arm, twice in two days.

            “Where did you come from?” he asks, rubbing his shoulder. There’s a bottle of aspirin in the truck, saved for emergencies, and he’d rather not waste two tablets on himself, but the temptation is definitely there.

            “I’ve been calling and calling your name,” Bilbo says. “Sorry I wasn’t out here to greet you properly. Long night, you know.”

            Thorin turns and looks around, as if something in the landscape will give him a clue. The crickets carry on, undisturbed. Bilbo is tilting his head sideways and eyeing Thorin as if there’s something wrong with him. Thorin flushes and turns back to the house to hide it. “It’s fine,” he says. “Just been continuing on from yesterday.”

            “That’s wonderful, thank you.” Bilbo comes around to stand beneath the scaffolding. “I’m glad you could come back. The weather’s certainly good for working.”

            “It won’t hold,” Thorin says, automatically, because it never does. Spring might be drier up here than down in the islands, but the wide blue skies above them will see clouds soon enough. He climbs up to the next level. Looks down at Bilbo below, at the dark shadows under his eyes, cast by the overhead sun. “D’you want to come up?” he asks, the words out of his mouth before he even has time to think them over.

            “I’m not exactly good with heights,” Bilbo says, but puts a hand on the lower rail. “Are you sure?”

            Thorin nods, even though he isn’t sure. Sure that the scaffolding can hold both of them, yes; sure of what he’s doing, not even a little bit. But then there they are, both atop the roof of Bywater, looking out over the landscape. Bilbo sways on the spot, caught up by the sudden shift in perspective, a feeling of vertigo washing over him. He reaches out, on instinct, and catches hold of Thorin’s arm. Grips his sleeve just above the elbow and steadies himself. The highlands are empty before them, rolling hills and swathes of dusty heather all the way out to the rocky cliffs that jut out against the sea. On the other side of the house, not visible, is the city. Thorin shoots a glance down to Bilbo’s hand, pale, fine fingers against the worn-out denim of his shirt.

            “I used to live by the coast,” Bilbo says. “But it wasn’t anything like this. The east is much . . . I want to say much more cultivated, but that’s not quite right. More civilised? Less wild, at any rate.”

            “I lived by the coast before, too,” Thorin says. “West, near the islands.” He doesn’t know why he’s telling Bilbo this. It’s been so long since he’s talked to anyone but the boys, had anyone to talk to about his own life, and Bilbo is still holding onto his arm. Why is Bilbo still holding onto his arm? “I think I know what you mean.”

            “As though you could just drop out of the world. Although, I’ve been here a month now and have never even been out to the cliffs, so I suppose my life wants a little more adventuring before I disappear.” Bilbo smiles up at Thorin. Notes the strong line of his jaw, his nose, a face of hard angles. Thorin looks tired, and Bilbo finds himself feeling guilty for all but demanding that the man come back and work a second day in a row. Who knows what other obligations he has in his life? “I’m keeping you,” Bilbo says, when his voice catches up with his thoughts.

            “What?” Thorin asks, and his eyebrows draw together, and all right, Bilbo’s voice hasn’t actually caught up. That came out wrong.

            “From your work,” Bilbo clarifies quickly.

            “Oh.”

            “And I didn’t intend to press-gang you into coming back today. Really, you can set your own hours, it’s not as if I’m going anywhere. I could even leave you a key, I suppose, if that’s easier for you.”

            “No, it’s—” Thorin starts to say, and then has to stop, because he doesn’t even know what words he wants to come next. Because he, in a way, wants to be kept here. Just here, looking out over the wild, entirely at peace. Except, who would look after the boys? “I need the money,” he says, and might as well just jump off the fucking roof. Being far too blunt has always been one of his faults. What happened to losing his honesty? Why does it have to come back at the worst possible moments? “I mean, it’s not a problem.”

            “I’m glad,” Bilbo says. “And I’ll pay you for your time, I promise.”

            “No, I really didn’t mean to say that,” Thorin says. He tugs away from Bilbo and stuffs his hands in his pockets. “You paid me far too much, yesterday. I can’t accept it. And the food, too, that was—”

            “Thorin, there was no way I could eat all of that by myself. I grew up in a large extended family and I have yet to figure out how to cook for less than twelve. Honestly, you’re doing me a favour by taking it off my hands. Left on my own, it would only be a matter of days before I got far too fat to even climb the stairs, let alone up here.” Bilbo runs a hand over his stomach as he speaks; not fat, but not hollow, either, beneath the softness of his shirt.

            “You don’t understand. It’s— I don’t need charity,” Thorin says, and if he’s jumping to conclusions, it’s only because he’s been here before. Had this same conversation, nearly word-for-word. Last time, it ended with his fist in another man’s face, and he’s not proud of that at all.

            “I know that,” Bilbo says. Thorin frowns; that’s not how the conversation is supposed to go. “I’m not trying to offend you,” Bilbo continues, “and I’m sorry if I have already. I just thought that you looked like you’d enjoy a good meal. If this is your way of telling me that my cooking leaves a lot to be desired, though, have it out and let’s be done with it. Well?”

            Thorin wants to look back at Bilbo. Can hear the laughter barely suppressed in his voice. “Your cooking’s fine,” he says, a bit more gruffly than he means to. “And . . . and appreciated.” He almost wants to tell Bilbo about the boys. It’s not that they’re some secret he needs to keep; he’s not ashamed of what he does, what his family has become. No, his family is all he has left. And perhaps that’s exactly why he’s so hesitant to share it, even just in conversation—he’s terrified, honestly, that any day now someone will show up and take the boys away. All it would take is a stray word to the wrong ears, or one too many remarks from any of the boys’ schoolmates. He’s terrified and he hates it, hates living in fear, hates even more that he can’t provide for them the way he ought to. Wonders every day, sometimes twice a day, whether the boys hate it, too. Or worse, hate him.

            “Good. That’s settled, then,” Bilbo says, and startles Thorin out of his thoughts, the motion of him stretching his arms over his head a blur in the corner of Thorin’s eye. “I’m afraid I was horribly lazy this morning and only just finished breakfast, but if you’d like tea—”

            “I should get to work,” Thorin says, and stops himself from commenting on how pale Bilbo looks, how deeply he must have been sleeping to not hear Thorin knock. He really can’t talk. At this point, tiredness is imprinted on his bones, ingrained so deeply he can never shake it off. If he should be concerned about anyone’s exhaustion, it’s his own. “You all right to get back down from here?” he asks, and hopes that Bilbo takes the hint for what it is: a dismissal. He’s getting too distracted.

            “I’ll manage. If you need anything, let me know. I’ll be cleaning out the sunroom today, so try not to drop any slates through the glass roof.”

            “I wouldn’t,” Thorin protests, and then turns to see that Bilbo is smiling. A joke, then. His sense of humour is really, severely out of practice.

            “No fear,” Bilbo says, and gives him a wave before easing himself back down over the edge of the roof.

            All things considered, Thorin should probably just wear his hard hat all the time, given how often he feels the need to knock his head against things after he opens his mouth. He works well into the afternoon, shoring up the chimney. The weather won’t hold, no matter how brightly the sun shines; there’s going to be a storm tonight, winds rising off the sea. They’re protected, down in the glen, in the city, enough that Thorin’s more concerned with flooding than high winds. If Bywater weren’t built halfway into the hills as it is, hadn’t been standing for a hundred years and more, he’d worry about it lasting the summer. But this house has lived through more than he can imagine. It doesn’t need some artisanal furniture maker with delusions of grandeur to come along and reclaim it from the wild as if it were a national heritage site or the like. It’s just a house, another home that’s not his own.

            There’s no sign of Bilbo when Thorin gets back down to the ground. The sunroom just around the corner is empty. He can tell from the outside that the wood is rotting, and makes a note to offer to rebuild it, even though it’s an atrocity. It doesn’t belong out here, on a house like this. There’s hardly ever any sun, anyway. Somebody’s foolish hope, that addition. Thorin tries the backdoor to the kitchen and, finding it unlocked, toes off his boots and steps inside. “Bilbo?” he calls. No answer comes, and he steps out into the hallway. Fingers the aged wallpaper, blinking against the dimness. “Bilbo?”

            Bywater creaks and sighs, settling around Thorin as he makes his way to the bottom of the staircase. He’s reluctant to go up to the second floor unasked. Already feels like enough of an intruder. The house has a presence of its own, and it’s not just the narrowness of the halls or the lowness of the ceilings that makes Thorin feel pressed in; Bilbo is nowhere in sight, and yet Thorin can’t shake the feeling that someone is following him. There’s a tension across the back of his neck, spreading into his shoulders. He turns on the spot, traces a line around the corners of the hall, sees nothing. Nothing but shadows across dark and faded wallpaper, across long wide floorboards. Bilbo must be upstairs, probably writing whatever it is he writes. There was a time when Thorin wasn’t a stranger to being in that creative frame of mind, so focused you block out everything around you. Dwalin had to physically lift him off his stool once when the table-saw overheated and started filling the barn with smoke—Thorin only had eyes for the dovetail joints in front of him, the chisel in his hands.

            Back in the kitchen, thinking to leave Bilbo a note, Thorin finds another thick envelope with his name on it. On the back flap, in a fine hand, Bilbo’s written:

 

> _In case you need to head out, there’s food in the refrigerator—help yourself. And take tomorrow off. It is a day of rest, after all! Everyone needs that._

     Thorin opens the refrigerator doors more out of curiosity than hunger, not intending to take whatever it is Bilbo’s left. Where is the man, anyway? In a neat stack of matching glass containers are sausages, mashed potatoes, and yet more tomatoes. Bilbo’s refrigerator is well-stocked and orderly, the crisper drawers full, three kinds of juice and a pitcher of water on the top shelf. The kitchen’s been updated, of course, since the house was built, but at least whoever did it had good taste. The appliances are understated, white enamel and stainless steel, clean lines against the dark floors. Thorin lingers, waiting to see if Bilbo will emerge from wherever he’s gone. He’s halfway down the hall, envelope tucked in his back pocket, when he turns around and goes back to take the food. “Bilbo?” he calls once more, wondering if he should be concerned. But really, Bilbo’s probably just fallen asleep somewhere, and in a way it’s easier for Thorin to leave, hands full of things he’s done nothing to deserve, when he doesn’t have to face the man.

            It isn’t until he’s driving back into the city that Thorin realises he never did leave a note. Embarrassed now, as well as still unaccountably on-edge, he has to pace the apartment parking lot for a full ten minutes before he can settle his face into a neutral enough expression to go inside.

 

Thorin doesn’t return to Bywater on Sunday. Bilbo insisted he take the day off, and though Thorin is reluctant to let a day go by without working, he does have to admit that he’s hardly seen the boys all week, and it’s not fair to them to leave them on their own for so long. Not that they seem to care that he’s around, doing their homework at the kitchen table in silence. He’d offered to take them out somewhere, to a park or up into the hills for a walk, but Fíli just shrugged it off, and Kíli, who does nearly everything his brother does these days, did the same, though he looked for a second like he would say yes. Thorin thinks that if he could just win Kíli over, Fíli would follow, and every day wouldn’t be a battle. Or at least, things would change; the battles would be ones he stood a chance of winning. They are getting better, but slowly, so slowly, every inch won a hard-fought siege.

            But then, he’s had seven years to get used to Fíli shadowing him and hanging onto his every word, and only four months to try to break through this new stubborn, grieving refusal. All the things Thorin has read—because he has done the reading, knows what all the child psychologists would tell him—say that it will take time. “Take time,” as if it’s something that can be neatly dealt out, in even increments, the same for everyone. Thorin knows that’s ridiculous. It took time for him to come to terms with his grandfather’s death, with his parents’. He’s still taking time to process the fact that he doesn’t have a younger brother anymore and Frerin died twelve years ago. Grief doesn’t take time so much as consume it, and all you can do is try to keep your footing, hope to come out the other side eventually, somehow still standing. So Thorin doesn’t press the boys, even though the pamphlets say he should. He has enough trouble sorting through his own emotions about Dís’s death, and anything he could say to try to comfort the boys would bleed into mutual sorrow, and that’s not helping anything, feeding the cycle like that.

            Although really, given how much loss his family has seen in his lifetime alone, it doesn’t seem to matter if you feed the cycle or not. It continues either way.

            Thorin spends a miserable day napping on the couch, pacing the front room, and trying not to loom over Fíli and Kíli at the kitchen table. He knows he should talk to them, knows he’s probably doing them more harm than good with every passing minute of silence. But how do you bridge that gap when the thing that most held you together has become the thing no one can stand to think about? They do have lunch together, at least; Bilbo’s leftovers, and Fíli is burning with questions, obvious enough that Thorin starts to wonder if the boy thinks he’s robbed a grocer. The bruise on Fíli’s face is beginning to turn yellow. Left unchecked, Kíli would have consumed the entire pan of blueberry crumble. From the outside, they seem to be coping. A little thinner, a little quieter than Thorin would like, when they’re not acting out, running wild in all three of the apartment’s rooms or getting sent to the headmasters’ offices at their respective schools, but largely coping. Lifting the container of dessert over Kíli’s head and stowing it in a high cabinet, Thorin could almost fool himself into thinking that they’ll be all right, just carrying on like this.

            But the only reason he’s even home to see them instead of still caught up in endless job-hunting is because a stranger with an old house—an old, broken, intriguing, unsettling kind of house—has decided to show Thorin kindness. It’s not that he’s unused to kindness. He has plenty of friends. Good friends, loyal to the point of fanaticism, and even if they’re some three hundred kilometers away he knows they would do anything he asked, should he ask it. And there’s the fundamental problem, there’s what’s really wrong with things: Thorin Oakenshield doesn’t like to ask for help. Can’t bring himself to do it, even if it’s for the ones he loves. Because he does love the boys, really desperately, so much that it makes him ache day in and day out, and he would do anything for them, but somehow that “anything” doesn’t include answering simple yes or no questions.

            Are you all right? No.

            Do you need help? Yes.

            He can’t do it. It’s like some kind of mathematical limit: he can approach it forever, but never actually reach it. Can lose his honesty piece by piece, lie so often it becomes routine, but there’s always something standing in the way of outright asking. Something that has forced him to become adept at dodging the point of people’s questions, whether it’s the foreman at Durin & Sons or one of the boys’ teachers. He’s become skilled at talking in vague words and clipped phrases.

            Don’t think that he doesn’t know the name of it, either, that driving force: it’s pride, plain and simple. The same pride that made Fíli punch out one of his rugby mates, the same pride that keeps Kíli from going to remedial reading classes even though his teacher is constantly sending notes about it. Thorin sits with him on the couch instead and they flip slowly through the pages, Kíli tracing words with his finger and muttering to himself, Thorin guiding him through rough patches in pronunciation. Books are the one thing their apartment has in anything like abundance, carried over from their old house in cardboard boxes and suitcases, stacked high at the foot of the boys’ bed or along the work table and atop the filing cabinet that passes for Thorin’s wardrobe; dog-eared paperbacks, serial comics, a set of encyclopedias in matching gilded bindings that must’ve been a gift from someone on their father’s side of the family, textbooks and dictionaries and atlases. Every interest the boys have ever had is chronicled in the stacks. Fíli reads in context, has to know everything going on around any book that becomes a favourite of his. Kíli is slower—much slower—but more eclectic, spending months at a time on the same novel before going off in a completely new direction. As a result, Thorin’s read along through a surprising catalogue of stories, these past four months.

            It’s a book that brings them out now, a history text Fíli is meant to have for lessons on Monday. “I forgot,” he tells Thorin, and the hesitation in his voice hurts to hear. “We’ll go out and buy a copy, Fíli,” Thorin says. “Now, before the shops close. Kíli, get your coat. Leave that for later,” he says, gesturing to whatever it is Kíli’s trying to build out of sheets of paper stiffened in a mix of glue and water. The boys’ crafts are best left alone, Thorin has found. Anytime he tries to help, they become elaborate, intricate affairs, and though the boys used to delight in having their uncle build the tiniest toothpick towns, Thorin has seen the aftermath of too many wrecked projects, stomped on by classmates or thrown into the toilet. Kids are cruel, and the more you stick out the crueler they are, and Thorin lets the boys muddle through their own science projects now.

            On a rainy Sunday afternoon the streets are practically empty; the long walk to the used bookstore down by the bridge is quiet, but the silence is a far more pleasant one that what had been smothering them in the apartment. There’s a bigger shop in the center of town, but they’re headed to the one where Dís used to take the boys. Thorin lets Fíli lead the way, keeps Kíli’s hand in his as they walk, wondering where yesterday’s sun went, and if he’ll be working in this wet weather tomorrow. The park is empty; the bus stop is empty; two or three people mill about outside one of the local pubs. A family of ducks swims back and forth beneath the bridge, playing in the gentle current. The used bookstore is called Rivendell; the name has nothing to do with the river it sits atop, but with the glen, the low-lying land of the whole city. The hills curve up around the city, and the cliffs rise on either side of the river mouth. But this was a floodplain once, down here in the flats. The sea rose up in a storm, burst over the dyke wall and drowned the land. Just east of the train tracks you can still see the dead lines of drowned trees, bog grass flat and brown. When Dís first moved up here and Thorin came along to help—“the manual labour,” she’d called him, joking—they walked out into the marshes one evening, a sliver of a moon out over the sea, the last of the day’s light dimming to dusty red behind their backs. “What the hell are you doing, coming all the way out here?” Thorin had asked. “Starting over,” Dís had said; “Getting out.” Out of what, exactly, didn’t need to be said. Thorin already knew.

            Thorin’s only been inside Rivendell a handful of times. It’s an older building, warm woods and pale grey stone, plants absolutely everywhere, two floors of books with a winding staircase in between and a tiny basement café. With the wages Bilbo’s paid him these last two days, Thorin could even afford to buy the boys a scone each, if they behave. He turns them loose on the main floor, gives a nod to the girl behind the counter, and goes off to their local history section to see if they have anything on Bywater house and whoever it was who built it, all those long years ago. There’s something about the house beyond its age and its architectural style that he can’t let alone. Something he can’t define, wants to attribute to too little sleep and too much whisky but can’t quite write off. There are plenty of books about the region, the important battles fought here back in the 11th century, the kingdom of Moray, the castle. Books, too, about city planning and the history of the local distilleries, about the cathedral on the opposite riverbank. There’s a slim volume, dating back to the forties, about regional architecture, but it doesn’t tell Thorin anything new. Thatched cottages and stone houses, fishing huts, all fairly typical. Nothing about the Arts & Crafts movement and how it might have spread all the way up here to the highlands, nothing about the aesthetes. Thorin glances up at the girl at the counter, wonders if she might know anything. She’s awfully young to be working, though Thorin suspects it’s a family business, and she doesn’t do much besides smile and ring up the till, fingers quick on the ancient mechanical cash-register.        

            “Something I can help you find?”

            The question startles Thorin so much that he turns on his heel and backs into a bookshelf. Standing just before him in the aisle is a man, tall and lean, long hair in a sleek dark ponytail. He’s wearing a dress shirt and slim, neatly pressed trousers and Thorin feels shabby just looking at him. “No, thanks,” he says, but the man doesn’t go away.

            “You came in with Fíli and Kíli,” he says instead.

            Thorin straightens up and all but glares at the man. He can’t decide what question to ask first. Settles on saying, “What’s it to you?” Not the most eloquent.

            “Forgive me,” the man says, and inclines his head. “I knew their mother, that’s all. It’s been some time since I’ve seen Dís, and you’re clearly family. I thought I might introduce myself. My name is Elrond, I’m the owner.”

            “Thorin Oakenshield. Dís . . . was my sister.”

            Elrond pauses a moment, and then nods. “I see,” he says. “I’m very sorry, Thorin.” His eyes are a dark blue-grey but warm, warmer than most others when they’ve said the same words. “She used to come by with the boys after school, in search of new books several times a month. How are they holding up?”

            “They’re all right,” Thorin says, because what else is he supposed to say? “I mean, they’re . . . yeah. They’ll be all right,” he amends.

            “And you?”     

            “What?”

            “How are _you_ holding up?” Elrond asks. His hands are clasped behind his back, but he’s leaning forward ever so slightly, pushing at the edge of Thorin’s personal space.

            “I’m fine.”

            It hits Thorin then, standing there in the local history section with the bookshop’s owner staring him down, that this is the first time anyone has asked him that. He swallows tightly and tries to hold Elrond’s gaze. Reminds himself that Dís would have given him an earful if she ever found out he was rude to one of her friends—and she always found out. He’s saved from the embarrassment of whatever would have come out of his mouth next by the girl at the counter.

            “Daddy,” she calls, “can you come here a minute, please?” Elrond gives Thorin one last, slow nod before turning to go to his daughter. Thorin drags a hand over his face, presses his fist to his mouth. Wonders where the boys are, and whether they’ve broken anything yet. He picks his way through the shelves to the staircase, keeping Elrond and his daughter in his line of vision. The man’s still staring at him. Thorin climbs up to the second floor, spies Fíli and Kíli half-hidden behind an array of spider plants, seated on cushions on the floor and reading.

            “Did you find your book?” Thorin asks, crouching next to them.

            Fíli waves a textbook at him, not looking up from his reading. Kíli shifts over until he’s pressed up against Thorin’s side, pointing at a page in his picture book. “Look, look! There’s a new book, Uncle, and look, they’re going into the cave but that’s where the dragon is!”

            “I see that, Kíli,” Thorin says. “Are you two ready to go, then?”

            “Can we get it?” Kíli asks, holding the book up.

            “Kíli, we have a lot of books,” Fíli says, before Thorin can answer. “Come on, let’s just go.” He takes his brother’s hand and they stand up, brushing past Thorin to head downstairs.

            “Wait,” Thorin says, trying to catch up. “Wait, Kíli. We can get it.”

            “It’s all right?” the boy asks. Thorin nods. “Really?”

            “Really. Fíli, give me your book, I’ll go pay and you can take your brother down to the café. Go on,” he adds, when the boys hesitate. “I’ll be down in a minute.”

            “Thanks, Uncle!” Kíli says, and grabs Thorin’s arm, hanging off him. Then he drops to the ground and barrels down the staircase. Fíli stares at Thorin as if he doesn’t quite believe him, but then thumps off down the stairs after his brother. An elderly lady browsing magazines frowns at them. Thorin frowns right back at her, and she looks away. At the counter, the girl rings up the books and smiles at him, even though he’s reasonably certain he’s still frowning.

            “Tea and scones are our compliments,” she says as she hands him the bag and his change. “Please enjoy them.”

            “What?” Thorin asks. Wonders if the ability to startle him runs in this Rivendell family, along with their looks, tall and sleek, even this girl who can’t be more than fourteen.

            “The least we can do,” Elrond says, appearing out of nowhere to stand beside his daughter. “Arwen’s brothers run the café. I’ve already spoken to them, so go ahead and order whatever you’d like. And I hope you’ll bring the boys back again. They do enjoy it.”

            “Yeah, well,” Thorin says, prickling at the implication that he doesn’t know what his own nephews enjoy. But Elrond has that same patient half-smile, his hand on Arwen’s shoulder, and there is sincerity, not judgement, in his voice. “Thanks. For, uh, everything.”

            “Not at all,” Elrond says. “We’ll see you again soon.”

            “Right,” Thorin says, “sure,” and ducks down into the basement, leaving father and daughter still smiling. The boys are seated at a small table along the rough stone walls, a plate of scones rapidly disappearing before them. Thorin gives a nod to the two young men behind the bakery counter and goes to join Fíli and Kíli. And walks straight into a chair, smacking his shins against its metal frame. Bilbo Baggins is seated at the far end, the lamp over his table casting a golden haze over his hair, the soft turn of his nose, the tortoise-shell frame of his glasses. He looks up—of course—at the noise, the metal chair scraping along the stone floor, knocked aside by Thorin’s carelessness. Behind the pie case Elrond’s sons are laughing, quietly and behind polite hands but laughing nonetheless. Thorin can feel his face heating up and turns resolutely away, sits down with the boys and hunches his shoulders over.

            It’s no good. Bilbo comes over to their table anyway. “Well, hello,” he says. He’s wearing a bulky sweater, a shade of mustard yellow incongruously bright for such a rainy day. “Fancy meeting you here.”

            “Bilbo,” Thorin greets, and wonders when his voice dropped a register. The boys are staring at him.

            “Nice to see you out and about, Thorin. I was starting to wonder if you worked all the time, considering that you’re at my house before I’m up and don’t leave until after I’ve fallen asleep. I’m sorry about that, by the way, from yesterday. I don’t know what came over me. All of a sudden I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I hope you found everything all right.”

            “I— Yeah, it wasn’t any trouble,” Thorin says. Bilbo standing there just over Fíli’s shoulder has him on edge; that must be why he offers, “Join us.”

            “Are you sure? I don’t want to intrude.”

            Thorin pushes out the empty chair—beside him—by way of answer. At least this way they’ll be on eye level. “These are my nephews,” he says, as it becomes clear that Bilbo is waiting for introductions. “Fíli, on the right, and Kíli.”

            “Hello, boys. You can call me Bilbo. Your uncle’s helping me repair my house. Or at least,” he says, sending a smile over at Thorin, “I hope I haven’t driven him away. Will you be coming back, tomorrow?” Thorin nods. “Oh, wonderful. I meant to work on the sunroom yesterday but that didn’t happen, and then my editor wrote and wanted me to send him another chapter so I had to come into town to the postal office. While I was here, I thought I’d pick up some new reading material. I thought spring was meant to be drier up here?”

            “I . . . wouldn’t know,” Thorin says, a bit stunned by the speed of Bilbo’s speech.

            “They really have excellent tea here, don’t you think, boys?” Bilbo asks. “The owner’s sons, or so I’m told. I’d quite like to take home their entire case of pastries, but we must leave some for everyone else, right?”

            Fíli’s giving Bilbo a wary look, pale eyebrows drawn in. He keeps glancing over to Thorin, whether seeking confirmation or questioning, Thorin can’t quite tell. But Kíli seems taken to Bilbo right away, and gets up on his knees in the chair to see the man better. With crumb-sticky fingers, he reaches for his tea, tries to drink and talk at the same time and spills. “I got a new book today, too,” he says. “Wanna see?”

            “Certainly, Kíli.”

            “Uncle, show him my book!”

            Bilbo turns to Thorin, expectant. Thorin grimaces and pulls Kíli’s book out of the bag. When the boy reaches for it, he holds it back over his head. “Clean your hands first. And your shirt.” Kíli sticks out his tongue and steals Thorin’s napkin. It doesn’t make much of a difference.

            “I was just the same, at your age,” Bilbo says, leaning across the table. Thorin doesn’t see how it could be true. Bilbo’s hair might be in a state of perpetual disarray, but his clothes are neat, if never quite the right size, and his manners definitely outstrip Kíli’s by a far margin.

            “I doubt that,” Thorin says, and if he’s feeling like an idiot once again for opening his mouth, it’s worth it to see Bilbo laugh, tossing his head back, shoulders shaking.

            “Well, all right, I was a bit better,” he says. “But only because my mother wouldn’t stand for anything less.”

            The boys go still. Thorin lowers the book, sets it on the table.

            “Of course,” Bilbo says, taking stock of the fallen faces and quickly coming to more or less the right conclusion, “when I was your age, I wasn’t reading nearly such difficult books.” He takes the book from Thorin’s hand with the briefest brush of fingers and starts flipping through it. “Your reading skills must be quite good.” Kíli perks up a little, and his brother relaxes back into his chair. Bilbo spares Thorin a glance from the corner of his eye. The man is sitting ramrod straight, never mind that that position makes his knees knock against the underside of the table.

            If the boys have lost their mother, and likely recently, too, that certainly explains why Thorin would be out with them. Might explain, also, why Thorin was so quick to take payment in cash. If he’s the one looking after these boys, that is, and trying to bring them up in this expensive city. Bilbo wonders if the boys go to private schooling or public, and where they’re living, and whether their father’s in the picture, and with a pang in his gut realises that Thorin’s bafflement to being strong-armed into lunch the other day probably had more to do with hunger than any rudeness of character. Making a quick resolution to keep feeding them all, as much as possible, and an equally quick resolution to be as subtle about it as possible, Bilbo nudges his shoulder against Thorin’s. It’s all right, he wants to say; You’re doing a great job. Because now that he knows what to look for it is so painfully obvious that the way Thorin is, how he carries himself, how he speaks, how he dislikes both asking and answering questions, comes from the position he’s in and the worries he holds. And though Bilbo prides himself on being perceptive, if he can see this much in just a few days, Thorin must be practically overrun. Bilbo has had his own share of worry, but his came from looking after parents, not children, and even though it’s similar in many ways he also knows he can’t ever relate. You can’t ever know, not really, what’s going on in anyone else’s life. Bilbo knows this, and yet, pressed against Thorin in a basement café, two young boys looking at them expectantly from across the table, he’s determined to try.


	4. Chapter 4

Monday finds them back at Bywater again, Thorin fixing Bilbo’s back door, in and out of the kitchen as he works. Bilbo’s writing in the front study; Thorin can hear the clatter of typewriter keys, short bursts followed by long silences. The day is overcast and cool, a light breeze blowing off the sea. Thorin’s grateful, odd as it may seem, that the sun isn’t shining. After putting the boys to bed last night, he couldn’t sleep, stayed up far too late jumping at every odd noise from the back alley or the hallway, pacing a new indent in the floor. Drank far too much whisky in a pathetic attempt to at least get some peace from his thoughts, if not outright sleep, and now it’s morning and he’s horribly hungover, exhausted, and also out of whisky. So there’s that.

            At some point—Thorin couldn’t even say how long he’s been working, except that the latch is fixed and the hinges are tightened and he shored up the sagging back steps—Bilbo comes back into the kitchen, hair standing on end, barefoot. “I’m half-starved,” he says. “And if I write any longer, my fingers may stop working.”

            Thorin grunts in reply, incapable of speaking actual words yet, both because he’s starting to wonder if he should just throw up and be done with it, and because he has a mouthful of nails. When he finishes tacking in the screen, and spits out the last nail, he says, “Door’s done. Still waiting on the slates for the roof, otherwise I’d do that, too. I could clear out your fireplace . . .”

            “No, no, have a seat,” Bilbo says, and waves him into the nook. “I’ll be right over.”

            “Or I could go check the attic. Make sure it’s holding up.”

            “No need. I was up there yesterday. Last night? Sometime, anyway.” Bilbo is slicing lemons, neat and methodical on a wooden cutting board. The gold ring glints on his left hand, yellow against yellow. “We have to talk about restoration plans, anyway. Might as well do it over lunch, right?”

            “It’s past lunch.”

            “Does that matter?”

            “Not much,” Thorin says, and eases himself onto a bench. He’s spent the large part of three days in this house now and yet feels like he doesn’t know anything about it beyond the kitchen and the dark front hall and the roof. He could draw the roofline from memory, pick out the quarry the stone walls came from if he were to drive past it, but that’s just the exterior. Inside is where the mystery is. Bilbo doesn’t seem to have a lot of possessions. The kitchen is outfitted well but there are plenty of open shelves; a glance into the drawing room beyond shows clean, bare floors, not even a rug; the front parlour on the other side of the hall is all shadows but Thorin suspects it, too, is far from crowded. The attic is the only place that looks full.

            Turning his head at the briefest snatch of a voice, Thorin sees only Bilbo, who has clearly not said anything. Bilbo pours lemonade into tall glasses and brings them to the table, along with a plate of sandwiches. Does food just materialise around him, then? Wouldn’t that be a gift to have, Thorin thinks, and slides over on the bench to make room for his host.

            “I hope you’ll forgive me for bringing this up again,” Bilbo says. “But I felt I needed to apologise, for yesterday. I didn’t mean to bring up bad memories.”

            “You didn’t.”

            “Thorin, I saw the looks on all your faces. I went and ruined what I’m sure was a lovely outing. I hope you’ll bring the boys by sometime, let me make it up to them.”

            Nodding without really thinking about it, Thorin takes a drink of lemonade and wishes his head would stop aching.

            “They’re in school all day, yes?” Bilbo asks.

            “Yeah. And then Fíli’s got rugby practice after, and Kíli waits with him.”

            “It’s very good of you to look after them. No, don’t shrug, it is. It’s . . . very difficult, looking after people. Kids in particular, I’d imagine. I don’t know the first thing.”

            “You were good with them yesterday,” Thorin says. “Better than I am, really.”

            “Oh, come on, surely you’re selling yourself short.”

            “We don’t— It hasn’t been— They’re good kids, but I don’t know how to talk to them.” Later, when he has a clear head to think things through, Thorin will blame this on being hungover and sleep-deprived, on the comfort of Bilbo’s kitchen, lemonade and cucumber sandwiches—really, who the hell makes cucumber sandwiches? His mental filter’s turned off. And Bilbo is just sitting there, listening, waiting. So Thorin tells him practically everything. Tells him about Dís, healthy one day and ill the next and never getting any better; about the boys, changed from easygoing to temperamental, his own difficulty talking to them as kids when they’re the only family he has left and he’s desperate for someone to mourn alongside of so he doesn’t have to do it alone; about Oakenshield’s and all that he’s left behind there. Frerin comes up somehow too, and their father, and the whole story just keeps spilling out, and Bilbo just sits, listens, refills Thorin’s glass and slides him another sandwich. Thorin eats and drinks automatically, his throat thick, the cucumbers like cardboard on his tongue. At some point he’s wiping his face on his sleeve and Bilbo’s hand is on his arm, just where the hem of his t-shirt sleeve meets skin. That’s the other thing about Bilbo that Thorin can’t get over: he’s generous not only with his food but with his touch. Thorin hasn’t been around someone so tactile since he left his barn, and doesn’t know what to do with it.

            Through this all Bilbo is quiet. What can you say, in the face of such tragedy? This is the sort of thing he writes as the plots of his novels, not something people should have to live through in real life. And sure, he has his own share of grief that he could contribute. Thorin might feel better if they were a bit more obviously on equal footing. But whenever Bilbo starts to open his mouth, to tell Thorin how he watched his own father take ill and fade away, his mother following after, all he can hear is his mother’s voice telling him, “There’s no use having a contest to see who’s the most unhappy. Who has the right to judge? And who would want to win?” Bilbo thinks afterwards that Thorin has probably won already, and that thought in itself is so unhappy he presses his lips together and turns away from the window, straightening up the kitchen with more than usual fervour. If his pans are a little more scoured that afternoon, his floors more vigorously swept, at least he keeps himself from sorrow long enough to see Thorin off from the front steps, to watch the Land Cruiser bounce down over the hills and towards the glen.

            They have their first brief argument not even two minutes before, Thorin refusing payment and food, saying, gruffly, “Job’s not done yet, you can pay me later,” but Bilbo can recognise the look of someone who is hungry, and hates that he can’t speak up about it for fear of driving Thorin away. The least he can do—and does—is slip the money into one of the pockets of Thorin’s coveralls when the man’s not looking. He’ll feed Thorin more next time, and leave containers of food in the truck if need be. Risking another argument’s not the problem; he doesn’t know yet where the line is, and when he might be about to cross it, and push Thorin away entirely. He may have come up here to find some solitude, to clear his head and write his book, but then he bought this old rambling house and then his book started to write itself, or so it seems, and he may as well scrap all his other plans regarding highland isolation and take a leaf from E.M. Forster instead: “Only connect.” The simplest, most basic, most human thing, and yet so terribly hard. Bilbo’s seen both sides of the divide now, grown up in a family with countless cousins constantly underfoot and then seen them all move away while he stayed behind in a dying town, with dying parents. He is, he thinks, well placed to make those connections. But then, he’s also never met anyone quite like Thorin.

            Thorin, predictably, feels like a complete idiot afterwards, as he shoves off from the table and clambers back up to the roof, his shoulder twinging in pain still but he needs to put some distance between himself and Bilbo. When he leaves Bywater that afternoon to go pick up the boys at school, he tells himself he can’t come back. Has gone too far, said far too much, and now that he’s a complete disgrace his only option is to disappear. And yet, even hours later, the whole drive back to the city through the hills, the whole long night on the couch listening to the cars passing by, there is also relief. To have finally said it all to someone, and to have it be accepted, no questions asked, and for Bilbo to say what he did after it all—relief. Thorin feels practically weightless with it, until a new fear enters his mind: How long can this last? How long can he possibly keep this up?

             

Not long at all, apparently. Thorin takes the day off on Tuesday, because the relief has fled and he feels like he won’t be able to look Bilbo in the eye, and wonders if it’s possible to _still_ be hungover, two days later. The thin carpeting surges underfoot as he moves about the apartment; the crows feeding from the dumpster in the alley are ear-splitting. The morning goes as it always does, breakfast surly and slow, the boys dragging their feet out the door. He walks them to their schools, but doubts that it makes a difference. Fíli broke one of their two chairs this morning. Threw it clear across the room, sending Kíli running to slam the bedroom door and hide while his brother and his uncle yell at each other. Now, standing on the sidewalk in front of Fíli’s school, Thorin knows he should say something but the words just won’t come. Fíli stomps up the school’s steps without even a look back. Thorin sighs and brings a hand up to massage his temples, tells Kíli, “I’ll meet you after practice,” sends him off across the road. He’s half tempted to go down to the local pub, responsible adult behaviour be damned, but finds himself walking along the river instead.

            He knows, has known for years now, that he needs to figure out how to get his temper under control. Especially now, when he doesn’t have Dwalin around to knock some sense into him, metaphorically or literally. When Thorin gets upset, it’s loud and it’s clear and it’s dramatic; he throws things and shouts and has to go out of the flat so Fíli and Kíli don’t see. They must know, though. If they didn’t know before, they certainly know now, after four months of living on top of each other, and fuck if Fíli isn’t following in the same way. But really, Thorin suspects Dís told them about her oldest brother’s temper ages ago. They’ve always learned young, in this family, how to recognise a fight, when to keep your head down and when to stand your ground.

            A colony of herring gulls screeches past, streaking down the river towards the sea. The air smells of fish and rain and bog mud, typical spring. Rare days of sun, weeks of clouds, and near-constant threats of rain. Thorin wonders if the boys wouldn’t be happier if he’d just packed them up and moved them back south with him from the start, if the new scenery wouldn’t shake them loose from this slump they’ve fallen into. Slump, hah; That’s about the least adequate word you’ve come up with yet, Oakenshield, he thinks. Down on the pier, fog is rolling in off the water and fishermen are returning to their moorings, out across the low-tide flats. The problem is that he has no place here, nowhere to call home, no proper job, nothing worth going back to except the boys, and he’s doing a bang-up job of that. The problem is that everyone always said he was a leader, but most days he’d prefer not to have anyone following.

            So it goes, most of the day. The city’s easy enough to wander in, narrow cobblestone streets, footbridges crisscrossing the river. By the time four-thirty rolls around hunger is gnawing at Thorin’s stomach. He shoves his hands into the pockets of threadbare jeans and makes his way back to the rugby pitch—really just a corner of the city park where they’ve uprooted most of the trees. Kíli’s dark head is easy enough to pick out on the top row of the bleachers. Hanging back a minute, Thorin watches the kids race across the pitch, not playing rugby so much as running about in a mob. One of the kids in that mob is the one who’s been giving his boys a hard time. It’s not as if staring hard enough is going to tell Thorin which kid that is, but he stares all the same, boys aged seven through twelve in blue and white kits, mud-coated. Soon enough practice disbands and Fíli’s climbing into the stands to fetch his brother, barefoot with his cleats hanging around his neck and a towel over one shoulder. Thorin buys them fish and chips on the way home and they eat as they walk, straight out of the paper, Kíli getting grease stains on his uniform shorts that Thorin will have to figure out how to clean later. The dinner is as close to a gesture of apology as he can make. Words certainly don’t seem to work. Evening is calmer than morning; Thorin repairs the broken chair while the boys do their schoolwork, shower, go to sleep beside each other. The only thing keeping their little fractured family together right now is the fact that the boys have basically grown up plastered to each other’s sides, and no amount of shouting or broken furniture is going to change that.

            The rain starts up again around three o’clock and Thorin’s awake to see it. Stands at the one window in the front room and looks out over the alley, watches the puddles form. Sleep is a lost cause; Fíli and Kíli, fortunately, sleep like the dead for at least eight hours, and that is one small thing he never has to worry about. But if he stays in the flat any longer, he’s going to go insane. So he locks the door behind him and goes out, umbrella in hand, into the rain. He’s actually irrationally angry about the umbrella, that he could remember to be practical but can’t handle his own emotions. If he’s going to be capable of dealing with one problem in his day, it could at least be one of the important ones. Oh, sister, what were you thinking, leaving things like this? he wants to know. Leaving your boys with me, and me with them, and none of us with anyone to connect us, to go between. Of course, it’s not as though Dís had another choice, with the rest of their family dead. This is why she left him in charge: he will do whatever it takes to keep them together, to keep them safe and always together. In the care of another, separated, they wouldn’t stand a chance. And if he’s being honest he knows, too, that he couldn’t bear to know that they were with anyone else. Dís certainly wasn’t going to leave them to her husband’s family; they never got along. Kíli actually bit his father’s brother once, Thorin remembers, and that thought lifts his mood enough for him to look up beyond his feet on the stone street and notice someone standing under a street lamp beside the river.

            Of all the people it could possibly be, it’s Bilbo. Who has, apparently, been standing under that street lamp for the past fifteen minutes because he’s absolutely soaked. Funny, as out of the pair of them Bilbo’s the one who always seems to have his shit together. The “always” comes easily to Thorin’s mind, for all that he only met the man five days ago, and he tries not to think too hard about that. Thorin calls Bilbo’s name four times before the man answers, turning around and looking completely dazed. “What are you doing out here?” Thorin asks, tilting the umbrella up to cover both of them. “Bilbo?” They’re the only two foolish enough to come out a night like this—the rest of the street is empty. “Bilbo?” Thorin asks again. Rain is dripping down the back of his neck.

            Bilbo blinks and presses his lips together, lifts his chin a bit. “Sorry,” he says. “Right, sorry. Hello, Thorin. We do keep meeting in the oddest places, don’t we? I’m just . . . Would you believe I’m on my way home?” Bilbo pushes wet hair off his forehead.

            “Really,” Thorin says, raising an eyebrow.

            “Really.”

            “Kíli can come up with better excuses and he’s five.”

            “Well, we can’t all have Kíli’s gifts.”

            “Thank God.”

            Bilbo laughs a little. He really is losing it. Has to be, to be out here in the pre-dawn hours, in the rain. He’d been writing, in the upstairs study, looking out over the dark expanse of back lawn to watch the moonlight reflecting over the rough sea. The story that he set out to write isn’t the one he is actually writing. He has no clue, in fact, where that story is coming from. Every night he writes, and every morning wakes to more words than he remembers. This morning, when Thorin didn’t show up, Bilbo used his time to break his own rule about re-reading yesterday’s work. Not that it did him any good; he can’t remember a word of it now. And the attic flooded again, the water dripping down into one of the spare bedrooms. By the size of the stain on the ceiling, it must have been leaking for a while. It doesn’t make any sense. Thorin repaired the roof just days ago. Or was it longer? Standing here under the same umbrella, Bilbo feels as if they’ve known each other for ages. Perhaps Thorin can tell him, then, that the only reason he keeps dreaming about a flood is the rain and the leaking roof, and not some larger, looming disaster. That the quickening of his heart is a side-effect of over-excitement about the move up north, or of too many late-night pots of tea. Perhaps Thorin, who knows about Bywater, or at least about houses _like_ Bywater—if any of those exist—can tell him why the lights in the front hall never seem to work, or why the phonelines only work on outgoing calls. Faulty wiring? Water damage, again?

            “Are you all right?” Thorin asks, after about a minute of staring at Bilbo and waiting for him to speak. “Do you, uh, need a lift back to your house?”

            “I drove into the city,” Bilbo says, and blinks twice, three times, trying to clear the image of stained walls out of his eyes and focus on Thorin instead, holding a patterned umbrella and wearing a dark t-shirt, wet across the back and shoulders, his long hair tied back messily. Is it comforting that the both of us are out here, together, inadequately dressed? he wonders. Or is it just a little bit pathetic? “At least, I think I drove. Do you know, I can’t remember where I left my car.” There’s no sign of his Triumph on the main road, or down the nearest side street. Why can’t I remember? What’s wrong with me? This is why you should have stayed a morning person, Bilbo Baggins, he tells himself.

             Thorin studies him, the compactness of him: shoulders tight, back straight. He is struck, almost immediately, by how _small_ Bilbo is, there under his umbrella. A teenager on a bicycle goes splashing past, humming off-key as he disappears into the night. There’s no reason for the two of them to continue standing there, getting wet. But then, there’s no reason for either of them to be out at this hour in the first place. So really, they’re at a pointless standstill.

            “I should start walking, I suppose,” Bilbo says. “Long way home.” And he turns to go. Might as well salvage what’s left of his dignity. Next he’ll forget how to iron his shirts, or how to make his mother’s pork roast, and then where will he be?

            “Wait,” Thorin blurts out, taking a step. Bilbo stops, but doesn’t turn around. “You live at least nine kilometers from here. What are you . . .”

            “I would have thought that was obvious, Thorin,” Bilbo says, cocking his head to one side. Idly, he plays with the ring on his finger, turning the band against wet skin.

             “You’re soaking wet.”

            “Obvious,” Bilbo repeats. “Again.” He turns back around, finally. “That’s unlike you, really.”

            Bilbo’s stepped far enough away from the streetlamp that Thorin can’t read the expression on his face. Thorin shifts his footing, re-centers the umbrella. “Come over,” he chances, even though it is a phenomenally bad idea for many reasons. The boys are sleeping, for one, and the walls are paper-thin. Not to mention that the two of them left on uncertain terms yesterday, and then Thorin just ignored his promise to return this morning, and yes, he did find the envelope of cash tucked into a back pocket of his coveralls and the mix of gratitude and shame that came with it was definitely not welcome. And yet here he is, saying, “Come over.”

            “Over? Over to you?”          

            “Yeah. Er, I mean, to the flat”—Thorin, Bilbo has noticed, never calls it _his_ flat, just _the_ flat—“It’s just around the corner.”

            “I don’t think that’s a good idea right now. Considering . . .” Bilbo trails off, preferring to leave it unsaid rather than bring up how awkward Thorin obviously is feeling around him now. It’s a measure of grace he’s offering, really, by walking away from this. And a chance to sort through his own mind before bringing in another person’s thoughts. His head is determined to become a labyrinth these days, it seems, and isn’t that new. “Considering. Hmm. Goodnight, Thorin.”

            “It’s late. Bilbo, it’s nearly four in the morning.”

            “Is it? Good morning, then, in that case.”

            Thorin’s stepped forward and put a hand on Bilbo’s shoulder before he even realises it, and when he does, he questions what he’s even trying to do. There’s a reason he’s never invited Bilbo over, namely, that the flat is awful, utter crap. Peeling paint and mould he can’t keep out of the bathroom no matter how hard he tries, a broken pull-out couch and two wooden chairs, one of them now with a leg glued back on: it is not the sort of place you invite people to, particularly not people like Bilbo, who, though he may not always look it, comes from money. Thorin knows all of this, and is ashamed of it even as he hates being ashamed, but here he is, inviting. Why is he doing this? Why doesn’t anyone stop him? Where is his sister when he needs her?

            Bilbo looks from the hand on his shoulder up to Thorin’s face, and then off into the distance, down the street. “All right,” he says, mildly. “Lead on.” This is as good a time as any, he supposes, for reconciliation. So Thorin leads them through the center of town and out into the housing estate, the buildings changing from old stone to new as they go, tall and narrow on dirty streets.

            “It’s just here,” Thorin says, shaking rainwater off the umbrella. He shows Bilbo inside the building’s main door, and then up the stairs, down the hall. Bilbo toes off his wet shoes and leaves them outside before stepping into the flat. It’s dark inside, just the light over the stove casting a dim glow over the room. “The boys are asleep,” Thorin says, unlacing his boots. “I’d rather not wake them, so . . .”

            “Of course. They’ve school tomorrow, don’t they?”

            “Yeah.” Thorin opens a drawer and tosses a kitchen towel at Bilbo. “It’s clean,” he says, and Bilbo smiles.

            “I wasn’t worried.”

            “Can I, uh, offer you a dry shirt?”

            “No, no, I’m all right. Thank you, Thorin.” Bilbo rubs at his wet hair until it stands on end, taking the time to look surreptitiously around the flat, taking in the sparse furnishings, the single bedroom door, the sagging couch that must be where Thorin sleeps, a tiny gas range and tinier sink, peeling linoleum on the kitchen floor. The entire flat could fit comfortably into Bywater’s front parlour. Suddenly Bilbo feels ridiculous for having such a large house with just one person in it.

            “You don’t mind if I do?” Thorin asks.

            “What? Oh, no, go ahead.” Wrapping the towel around his shoulders, Bilbo tries to figure out where to sit and do the least amount of damage. Wet pants on wood never ends well, though the chairs at the table are hardly fine furnishings. In a space so small, it’s impossible to be subtle about watching Thorin strip off his wet t-shirt, showing lean, tanned muscle, a line of hair down his chest. He’s a good deal thinner than Bilbo expected, for someone who gives off such an imposing impression, who has such a broad back. Thorin bends to get a dry shirt out of the middle drawer of a filing cabinet along the wall, tugs it on over still-damp hair and then fights to get his arms through. Bilbo’s trying to school his face into a more appropriate expression when Thorin turns and tosses a sweatshirt at him.

            “At least put that on,” he says. “You’re drenched. What the hell were you doing, walking about in the rain like that?”

            “Just . . . walking,” Bilbo says, and turns the sweatshirt over in his hands. It’s pale grey with navy lettering across the back, the International School of Furniture, and a strange crest with stags holding an urn of some sort. “I didn’t know you studied furniture making.”

            “I gave that to you to wear, not talk about.”

            “Sorry, I didn’t mean to pry.”

            “No, I— We can talk about it, just put the damn thing on first. Getting cold just looking at you.” Thorin reminds himself not to slam the drawer shut, not to stomp into the kitchen, to set the kettle down quietly on the burner. He turns to get two mugs out of a cabinet just as Bilbo’s pulling off his own wet sweater and gets a waft of damp-wool smell, sees a pale stomach and thin wrists emerge briefly from under a t-shirt before Bilbo is swamped in Thorin’s old school sweatshirt.

            “Cozy,” Bilbo says, and smiles up at Thorin. “So, furniture making?”

            “Yeah. That’s my real work. Not roof repairs.”

            “Well, I’m glad you made an exception just this once. Do you have any of your pieces here?”

            “No. I, uh, kind of had to leave things behind in a hurry when . . . when I came up here.” Thorin swings the kettle off the burner and pours water into the mugs, adds a splash of milk to his and holds the bottle up to Bilbo, who nods and says, “Please.” Turning a listening ear to the hall, Thorin settles in against the counter opposite Bilbo and tries to figure out what words he actually wants to say. “I was a bit of a smart arse after secondary. Didn’t see the point in uni. So I worked a year at the marina, filling in the crew on fishing trawlers. Whatever got me out of the house. Saved up enough for the course, mostly because it was on the other side of the country.”

            There are so many things Bilbo wants to ask about the Oakenshield family. Thorin’s mother, for one thing, and what happened to her, and how she felt about her son moving away. His own mother cried a little when he left for uni, never mind that it was only twenty kilometers away, practically just across the river, and him home every weekend and sometimes weeknights for supper. Of course, she’d later claimed they were tears of joy, for him finally getting out of the house. “And then you moved back home?” he asks, figuring that geography, at least, is a safe topic of conversation.

            “Thought I was going to stay over there,” Thorin says. “A couple of lads from the program, they wanted to start up a furniture company, wanted me to join them. We'd already been working together. But land was cheaper on the other coast, and I knew the area, so we ended up moving back. Bought an old farm, set up shop in the barn, knocked down a couple of wrecked outbuildings and started building from the reclaimed lumber.”

            Bilbo takes a sip of tea and smiles, recognising that he’s broken through Thorin’s conversational barrier once more, except this time there’s not quite so much grief involved. They end up talking about Oakenshield’s and Thorin’s school friends, about dovetail joints and the different chisel blades, all the tools Thorin’s hands have been missing, until the sun is just starting to lighten the skies. Utterly exhausted, in still-damp jeans, Bilbo kind of wants to just put his head down on the table right there in the flat. Maybe, he thinks, he won’t dream about floods again if he sleeps here. But Thorin is standing and stretching, pouring the long-forgotten dregs of his tea down the sink, and saying, “I should’ve driven you back hours ago.”

            “I’m glad you didn’t,” Bilbo says. “Though I have to confess I’m about to fall asleep right here on your table.”

            “Don’t do that,” Thorin says, too quickly. “I mean, uh, the table’s not worth it. Really, it’s junk. I could make a better one in my sleep.” Bilbo laughs at that and Thorin can’t help but smile, pleased that he’s managed—they’ve managed, together, somehow—to find a way of being in the same room together again. A soft rain falls as they drive out to Bywater, Bilbo’s head resting lightly on the window, and Thorin has never been given to metaphors but thinks that this one is fitting: for better or worse, Bilbo has become the rain to him, a steady presence, a steady _present_ , that washes away the past.


	5. Chapter 5

There’s something to be said for staying up all night and it is this: the next day is always, without a doubt, terrible. By the time Thorin gets back to the flat it’s nearly seven in the morning, and the boys are awake, wanting to know where he’s been. “Out,” he says, and sets about making them breakfast, brushing Kíli’s hair. The grass stains on his shirt—what was he even doing, to get grass stains on his shirt?—will have to wait another day. If he would just keep his jacket on, like he’s meant to, no one will notice. At least Fíli doesn’t have rugby practice today, and his mud-stained kit can stay soaking in the bottom of the shower.

            “Out where?” Fíli asks. “You’re supposed to look after us, you know.”

            “I do look after you!” Thorin snaps, annoyed as he fumbles with the stupidly tiny buttons on either side of Kíli’s collar.

            “Yeah, well, maybe you shouldn’t!” Fíli picks up his school bag and runs out of the flat, leaving brother and uncle stunned in his wake.

            “What the hell?” Thorin asks. “Fíli, wait! Damn these buttons.” He picks Kíli up, spins around to grab the boys’ lunches and Kíli’s bag, and runs out after Fíli. “Where is he going now?”

            Kíli squirms in Thorin’s arms. “Where _did_ you go last night?” he asks.

            “Nowhere, Kí.” No sight of Fíli down the alley, or in the courtyard. The main road, then?

            “He’s only scared ‘cause he woke up and you were gone. And then he said that maybe you didn’t want us around anymore. Are you going away?”

            “What? No. I just— Damn it, where is he?” Thorin spins around on the street, and finally catches sight of an unruly blond head, marching determinedly to school. “I’m not going anywhere, Kíli. And I will look after you, I swear. You and your brother both. You know that, don’t you?”

            Though Kíli nods and presses his nose into Thorin’s neck, Thorin’s not convinced. He catches up with Fíli quietly, doesn’t say a word until he’s within arm’s reach in case the boy tries to bolt. “Fíli,” he says, “listen.”

            “No.” Fíli turns around and gets up on tip-toes. He barely reaches Thorin’s chest. “I’m going to school, and I’m taking my brother with me. We don’t need your help. Kíli, come on.” When Kíli doesn’t move, except to look from one to the other, distraught, Fíli repeats, “ _Come on_. We’re going to be late.”

            With a quick, muttered apology, Kíli slides free from his uncle’s arms, takes their lunches and his school bag, and walks off arm-in-arm with his brother. Everything in Thorin is telling him to go after them. People on the street are staring. He’s just realised he’s standing there in a t-shirt and underpants, having taken off his damp jeans but not had a chance to put on dry pants before Fíli ran out. “What the fuck are you looking at?” he shouts in the general direction of the street, once the boys are out of hearing range, and walks stiffly back to the flat, raging the whole way. It takes all his years of carefully cultivated restraint not to throw the front door off its hinges.

            Driving has always cleared his head, so after dressing for work in paint-stained canvas pants and a faded flannel shirt, battered boots and thick wool socks, Thorin heads out into the hills, the windows of the Land Cruiser rolled down all the way, cool morning air rushing in. No matter how much Thorin tells himself that Fíli is only acting out because he’s seven and scared, that he didn’t mean what he said, it doesn’t help. Doesn’t change the fact that Thorin knows he’s doing his best and yet it’s not enough. He slams on the breaks and swerves to avoid a trio of sheep, who give him baleful stares as he crashes through the brush. Out at the top of the cliffs, overlooking the sea, the morning light is pale and grey against the flat, glassy water, stretching out to the horizon. Thorin shuts off the ignition and climbs out to lean against the hood, arms crossed, breathing hard. “Get it together, Oakenshield.” Honestly. They’ve had fights before but not like this, and though he knows that it’ll likely have blown over by the evening he can’t help worrying. The boys are too young for this, to have lost both parents and their home, to have to put up with him as guardian, and it’s only been four months. Well, nearing five now. How many more years of this do they have? How many can they bear?

            With eyes that feel like grit and a hunger in his gut, Thorin stares out across the sea for a good hour, watching the clouds blow past. Then, as a chill is beginning to set into his bones, he heads for Bywater. At least he hasn’t managed to wreck that yet; at least there is still that one thing he can handle. Resolving to ignore that unsettling feeling that keeps coming up when he sets foot in the house, Thorin pulls into the driveway and goes up to the front door. There, he hesitates. When he left Bilbo here, only hours ago, Bilbo pressed a key into his hand. “I’ll probably be useless tomorrow,” he’d said; “You may as well have the run of the place.” Standing here now, though, it doesn’t feel right to just open another man’s front door and walk into his house. On either side of the front door the lilacs are coming into bloom. Their fragrance is sweet on the air, bringing Thorin back in an instant to the path between the barn and their woodshed, a path always lined with lilacs. Dís used to cut them by the armful, bring them in still dew-damp and pile them on the workbench.

            Thorin knocks, even though there’s no point, and lets himself in when there’s no answer. He tried fixing the doorbell after he finished with the kitchen door, but no matter how he re-wired it, the damn thing still wouldn’t work. Thinking that he’ll just get a glass of water, and maybe swipe an orange from the basket on Bilbo’s kitchen counter, Thorin steps into the main hall. It’s dark, as usual, and the ceilings feel lower than he knows them to be. There’s a strange hum in the air, a sort of rumbling. When he takes another step forward, the floor sags under his feet. “Bilbo?” Thorin calls out, as he catches himself against a wall. The wallpaper feels damp beneath his hand. There’s a dark shape at the bottom of the stairs. Breath tight in his throat, Thorin presses forward, wishing he’d brought in the torch that he keeps in the truck. Wishing that he’d just taken the day to sleep. But then his boot brushes against something, and the dark shape turns out to be Bilbo, unconscious at the bottom of the stairs.

            “Bilbo? Shit, hey, come on,” Thorin says, dropping to his knees. He looks around until he spots a light switch. In the dim glow of a wall sconce he can see that Bilbo’s not bleeding, but has one hand flung out in front of him as if to ward something off. He’s still wearing Thorin’s sweatshirt. A brief debate over whether or not you’re meant to move an unconscious person wars in Thorin’s mind before he gets his arms beneath Bilbo and carries him into the front parlour, lays him gently on the chaise. Elevate the feet, that’s what Thorin remembers from his first-aid training, though that was for passing out due to low blood pressure, not a concussion, which Bilbo probably has. What do you do for a concussion? Check the pupils, for one—that would be easier if Bilbo was actually conscious. Thorin slides into the bench next to him, puts careful hands on his shoulders. “Bilbo,” he says, leaning in. Rain is hammering against the windows. When did it start raining? At least there’s reliable light in the parlour, even if the clouds gathering outside are dark. Slowly, very slowly, Bilbo opens his eyes. He’s pale and his lips are dry; his shoulders are trembling slightly beneath Thorin’s fingers.

            “Wh-what happened?” Bilbo asks. “Thorin?”

            “I just came by to work. Found you at the bottom of the stairs. Should be asking you what happened.”

            “I fell,” Bilbo says. “I think. Could you help me sit up?” His head is aching, an unbelievable pressure. When he tries to focus on Thorin’s face spots dance across his vision, shift into great smears of black. “God, I feel as though I’ve been hit by a truck. Remind me to go to bed in the future, would you?”

            “I’ll take you to the hospital,” Thorin says. “Where’s your coat?”

            “No, Thorin, no, I’ll be all right in a minute.”

            “Bilbo. You were unconscious.” How long had he been lying there, before I came in? Thorin wonders, followed quickly by, What if I hadn’t come?

            “Just a little worse for wear. Do you think— Could you get me a glass of water? I don’t trust my feet quite yet.”

            And I don’t trust your floors, Thorin wants to say, but gets the water without comment. What he felt, back in the hall, it was as though the entire house just . . . _shrugged_. If Bywater did that, with Bilbo at the top of the stairs, no wonder the man fell. “Do you remember what happened?” he asks.

            Bilbo gives a dry little laugh. “Not really, no. I suppose staying up all night didn’t help with my balance. Must have just lost my footing.” He drinks the water and lies back. Trying to remember makes his head hurt. He’s almost positive he’d been writing, in the upstairs study, when that knocking noise came back, from downstairs this time. Thinking that it may have been Thorin, he’d gone to check. That’s what happened, isn’t it? He can’t be sure. The house is quiet now, apart from the rain, the rumble of distant thunder. The chaise smells musty, its cushions cold and smooth beneath his head. Only yesterday he would’ve sworn that it was beneath the front window. Now, it’s against the side wall, the one part of the house—save for the cellar—that’s deepest under the hill. But no, there isn't a cellar. Is there? Thorin is staring at him, brow furrowed, mouth in a hard line, looking as tired as Bilbo feels. The intensity of the stare is too much. Bilbo closes his eyes.

            “Hey, no, stay with me,” Thorin says, and shakes him gently. “Let me see your eyes.”

            “What?”

            “Your eyes.” With a hand on either side of Bilbo’s jaw, Thorin tilts his head back, studies the wide, dark pupils. They’re the same size, which is good, but Bilbo looks far too dazed. “We really should get you to the hospital.”

            “The last thing I feel like doing right now is getting back into that truck of yours. It’s a safety hazard.”

            Thorin can’t argue with that. He’s surprised the Land Cruiser's still hanging on, honestly. “If you’re sure,” he says, looking Bilbo over, hands hovering hesitantly. Bilbo nods. It’s a stupid plan; the back of his neck is prickling although no one’s standing behind him, the room is cold, and there is something very _off_ about this house. Bilbo shouldn’t stay here. Even if it is only in their minds, surely a hospital would be the smarter option?

            “I’m sure. Really, I’m doing much better already. Actually, I’m . . . starving.”

            So that’s how Thorin ends up cooking brunch for the two of them, putting Bilbo’s extraordinarily well-stocked kitchen cupboards to good use. And he might be small but Bilbo eats more than anyone, even Dwalin. Watching as Bilbo puts away an entire rasher of bacon plus about half a loaf of fresh-baked bread, Thorin thinks of his friend and bites back a smile. He misses Dwalin fiercely, with an ache akin to a missing limb, a part of him cut off. They haven’t even spoken on the phone since sometime early last week, regarding an order for two sets of six-foot benches that Thorin had been working on before he left Oakenshield’s. The call had been strictly business; the second Dwalin asked after him, Thorin had invented some excuse and hung up the phone. It’s not that he’s deliberately keeping secrets. He just doesn’t know how to talk about his feelings, particularly with someone he holds in such high regard. Except then there’s Bilbo, polishing off a pot of jam in front of him, still looking like he’s not quite awake—there’s Bilbo, to whom Thorin spilled his entire life’s story, essentially, and whom he has come to respect a great deal. Admire, even. Admire? Is that the word for it? No, that sounds too ridiculous. Really, “admire” is the best he can come up with?

            After they eat, Bilbo goes up to his room—under Thorin’s careful supervision, lest he trip up the stairs—to rest, and Thorin paces around the kitchen, tries to find a project to work on for the rest of the afternoon until he has to go pick up the boys. He ends up falling asleep in the nook instead, head on the table. A creaking noise, moving through the house, wakes him with a start, so much so that he smacks his head against the window behind him. So now they have two head injuries between them. The noise fades as soon as Thorin stands, bracing himself on the table. The rain’s stopped, leaving the sky outside that eerie yellow that sometimes comes after an afternoon thunderstorm. Thorin goes up to check on Bilbo, though he still feels like an intruder upstairs. The hall is lighter, the wallpaper a paler colour, baseboards and flooring whitewash-pale. The master bedroom is on the north side, just over the front parlour. As Thorin heads down the hall, he counts the doors: six, plus Bilbo’s. But that’s not right. There were only five other rooms on the blueprints Bilbo showed him. Then he blinks, and the door to his left shifts, disappears. Crossing the hall in two quick strides, Thorin cracks open Bilbo’s door. Inside the master bedroom, the curtains are drawn, and Bilbo is curled up on the bed, asleep and breathing easily. Thorin kind of hates to leave him, but he did promise the boys that he’d be there to meet them after school. Considering how they parted ways this morning, he _needs_ to be there. Needs to show Fíli that he keeps his word.

            The challenge is what to do with the boys after he picks them up. He doesn’t want to leave Bilbo alone for the night; someone should be waking him up every few hours, just to be sure. Maybe there isn’t anything wrong with Bywater at all; maybe he’s just far too tired, and not seeing things clearly. Because that’s never been his strong suit, seeing things clearly. That’s what he’s always needed Dís around for, to cut through the distractions and get to the heart of the matter. The drive back into the city doesn’t help the way it usually does. When he finds parking on a side street a block away from the boys’ schools, Thorin’s still feeling like he’s been living underwater, fighting to get to the surface and catch his breath. Fíli comes out first, and Thorin’s not ready to talk to him but does it anyway, waving him over from the street corner. “Listen to me, Fíli,” he says, as the boy climbs into the Land Rover and buckles up in the passenger seat. “I know things aren’t great right now. Believe me, I wish your mother was here, just as much as you do, if in a different way. But we have to figure out how to do this on our own. Now, I swore that I’d look after you, and I will. You know that, don’t you?” Fíli nods, but only once, and stiffly. “What do you need from me?” Thorin asks, gentling his voice, leaning in the open window to look his nephew in the eye.

            Fíli shrugs, and presses back into the worn-out seat cushion. “Just . . . to be there.” He swallows, and loosens his tie. “I miss things the way they used to be. Not, like . . . I know they’re different now. With mum . . . gone. But I— I liked you better as an uncle than a dad. And I like you better here than not.”

            Thorin sighs and reaches a hand in through the window to rest it atop Fíli’s head. He’s certainly inherited his mother’s talent for being able to fairly knock someone over with nothing but words. “I’ll be there,” Thorin says. “Here. I’ll be here. This new job, it’s— Well, I guess you’ll see this afternoon.”

            “What do you mean?”

            “I have to go back out to Bywater. Bilbo’s house. And I’m taking you and your brother with me. I’ve left you two on your own for long enough. Too long.” Forcing a smile, Thorin drops his hand down to Fíli’s shoulder, gives it a squeeze. “I like being your uncle better than your dad, too.” Especially as he’s never approved of their dad. “So let’s try to get back to that, yeah?”

            “Yeah,” Fíli says, nodding. They wait for Kíli a few minutes more. Just as the boy comes out of the school’s front door, Fíli says, very quietly, “Sorry for this morning.”

            Thorin shakes his head. “I deserved that,” he says. “I’m going to go fetch your brother. You’ll be all right here?”

            “Yeah.”

            Kíli runs to Thorin and lets himself be flung up into the air, grinning with the easy kindness and quick forgiveness of a five-year-old. Thorin bundles him into the truck’s backseat and takes them out into the hills. Though he’s wary of the house, for reasons he still doesn’t understand and can’t explain, logic dictates that there’s nothing wrong, and that someone who has very quickly become extremely important to him is lying there asleep, and injured. So he has to go back.

            As they crest over a hill and catch sight of the house rising up from the ground, the boys let out a collective gasp. “Is that really where he lives?” Kíli asks.

            “It is,” Thorin says.

            “This is what you’ve been working on? It’s like something out of a story. Kíli, look, it’s half underground!” Fíli leans towards Thorin, trying to get a better view out of the driver’s side window.

            “Sit back,” Thorin says, as they jolt over a pothole. The moment he’s parked in the driveway the boys are out of their seats and running a circuit around the house. It’s too long since they’ve been out in the country, Thorin thinks. They used to come out to the barn all the time, run wild wherever they pleased. “I’m going in to check on Bilbo,” he calls to them. “Don’t get into trouble out here.”

            “No, we’re coming with you!” Kíli shouts, and comes skidding to a halt in front of Thorin. “I want to see inside.”           

            And after having just made a promise to Fíli, that he would spend more time with them, Thorin can’t exactly say no. “Don’t wander off,” he tells them. “And don’t break anything.”

            “Yes, uncle,” Fíli says, just short of rolling his eyes. Thorin cuffs him gently on the shoulder, and ducks under the lintel stone as they step inside. Not that the words have much effect—the moment the boys see the dark hallway they’re off, out of Thorin’s hands. Shaking his head, he leaves his parka on a hook in the entryway and mounts the stairs to go see how Bilbo’s doing, if he’s awoken or still sleeps. The banister shudders under Thorin’s hand until he tightens his grip, and then it stops. The wood looks charred, just at the edges of each tread. He never noticed that before. The boys’ voices carry up to the second floor, calling back and forth to each other about whatever it is that they’ve found.

            It turns out that Bilbo is awake, and glad for the company. “I was beginning to think I’d fallen into a dream,” he says.

            “How’s your head?”

            “Better, I think. Do I hear your boys downstairs?”

            “Yeah, I had to bring them, didn’t want to leave them alone. Should’ve asked you first.”

            “Nonsense, I invited them, didn’t I? If you’re prepared to stand by in case of emergencies, I’d very much like to go downstairs and say hello.” Bilbo stretches his neck to one side, then the other, rolling a stiff back. He lets Thorin help him stand, and then walks out to the hall with a large, looming, protective shadow. “Is it dark outside?” he asks. “Or do I need to be concerned about my vision?”

            “You need to be concerned about your fucking house,” Thorin mutters, under his breath.

            “Sorry?”

            “Yeah, it’s, uh, getting dark. Going on five o’clock.”

            “Suppertime, then.”

            “You’re in no shape to cook. And we don’t want to impose. I’ll make you something and then we’ll go.”

            “Thorin, don’t be silly. You have to at least let me feed you all. It’s my thanks,” Bilbo says, turning at the bottom of the stairs to put a hand on Thorin’s arm, sensing protest. “For coming all this way. You didn’t have to.”

            Thorin feels his face heating and ducks his head, shrugs. “Couldn’t just leave you,” he says. Then, thoroughly embarrassed, he turns away. “Fíli! Kíli! Where are you two?”

            “Here, Uncle!” Kíli comes around the corner, and Fíli sticks his head out from the drawing room. “Oh, it’s Bilbo!”

            “Hello, Kíli, Fíli,” Bilbo says. “Wonderful to see you again.”

            “Are you all right?” Fíli asks. “You don’t look well.” There’s a worried look on the boy’s face and it twists Thorin’s heart when he catches sight of it. It’s the same look, almost exactly, that Fíli was wearing when Thorin came to their door so late at night, with Dís so ill.

            “I’m fine,” Bilbo says, and wonders why Thorin frowns at that response. He _is_ fine. He’s just been spending too much time with his head in his book lately. Funny, though, that no matter how much or how little he writes, he can never remember the words the morning after.

            “Hmm,” Thorin says, and steers Bilbo into the kitchen, sits him down in the nook.

            “Can we go look upstairs?” Kíli asks Bilbo. “I wanna see the view.”

            “And the sunset,” Fíli adds. “We never get to see it from the flat. Too many buildings in the way.”

            “Go anywhere you like,” Bilbo says. “You have free reign here. Open whatever doors catch your eye.”

            “That’s not a good plan,” Thorin says, or starts to say, but then Fíli levels him with an accusatory stare and he bites his tongue. “Just be careful,” he concedes. “I haven’t tested the floors upstairs.”

            “Oh, I’m sure they’re all right.” Bilbo waves the boys off, and they shoot out of the kitchen, followed by a clamour of small feet on old wooden steps.

            “Sorry about that,” Thorin says. “They’re like . . . animals out of a cage. Been cooped up too long. My fault, really.”

            “Thorin, no, you’re too hard on yourself.”

            “It is. If we didn’t live in such a— Well, you saw it.”

            “It’s temporary,” Bilbo says. “And I don’t mind at all, having them here. They remind me of my own cousins. One in particular, he’d be about their age.”

            They fall into talking about families again, and listening to the odd thumps and the sounds of doors opening and shutting, as Thorin prepares supper for all of them. Bilbo dozes off in the nook, and Thorin can’t stop looking at him. One of the kitchen windows faces west, and the sunset really is a sight to be seen, out over the heath, but Thorin’s eyes are elsewhere, in the opposite direction.

            Gradually, he begins to notice that the house has gone quiet. Or rather, that he has gone deaf—there isn’t any sound, not even of boiling water from the pot on the range, not even of the curtains moving in the breeze from the open window. When he takes a step towards the hall his legs are heavy, as though he’s walking against a current, water up to his thighs. Where are the boys? Bilbo is still asleep—or passed out again? Thorin hesitates, torn between the two, and then runs for the stairs, or tries to, straining to make it to the bottom step. The light bulb in the wall sconce is flickering slowly, off, and then on again, and off. He’s halfway up the stairs and struggling for breath when Fíli and Kíli appear, hand in hand, on the top step. “There’s no room,” one of them says—Thorin can’t tell which, it’s too dark to see and the voice is strange, as if coming from across a chasm, distorted and scratchy. “There’s no room.”

            Thorin wants badly to believe that they’re only messing about but as he fights his way up to them he can see that Kíli looks frightened and Fíli is pale, the yellow of his faded bruise a dark smudge on his cheek, just one amidst other, darker smudges. Both of the boys appear to be covered in soot. “There’s no room,” they say again, or one of them says, and they take a step forward and fall from the top step. Moving to catch them as if he’s suddenly been thrown into a slow-motion video, Thorin reaches out and yells, though no sound comes out of his mouth. He knows he’s too far away. Then Bywater shifts, flickers in and out of darkness, and the boys are in his arms as he falls forward into the upstairs hallway, rolling to avoid crushing them beneath his body. His back hits the floorboards with a thud and sound rushes back in: Kíli crying, his own ragged breathing, and the creaking noise of a house settling into its foundations.

            “Are you all right?” he asks, slowly sitting up, still with an arm around each boy. “Kíli, Fíli? What happened?”

            “There’s no room,” Fíli says, and his lower lip trembles. “There— There’s no room.”

            “Fíli! Snap out of it.” The boy blinks, wild-eyed. “Come on, ssshh, I’ve got you. You’re all right. Kíli, you’re all right.” Thorin tugs the boys close to his chest and blinks back the burning of his own eyes. There’s nothing in the hallway—six doors, for six rooms, just as it should be—and nothing on the staircase, nothing anywhere that seems out of place. “I’ve got you,” he says again, stroking Kíli’s hair. His hand comes away blackened, ashy. “Where were you?” he asks, moving them all back from the top of the stairs, just in case. In case of what? He has no idea.

            “I don’t know,” Fíli says, his breath hitching. “I don’t know what happened, Uncle, I’m sorry.”

            “Sshhh, Fíli, you’re all right. I’m not upset with you.” Fuck, he thinks, and draws in a breath, holds it for a count of ten before letting it out. “Did you go up into the attic?”

            “No, we were just . . . I think it was a study. But then the lights went out, and the room got too warm, and Kí started crying so I said, Let’s go, but we couldn’t find the door. It was like everything got really small, all at once.”

            “The study?” Thorin asks, and cranes his neck to look at the door behind him. A perfectly normal door, standing slightly ajar. “Kíli, are you hurt?”

            “Nuh-no,” Kíli cries, and clings harder to his uncle.

            “All right, come on.” Thorin grunts under the weight of both of them but pushes himself up to his feet. Part of him wants, badly, to just kick the study door open, to reassure himself that there’s nothing more than a room. That there _is_ a room, contrary to what the boys kept saying. But what did they mean? He takes a step towards the door and Fíli shouts, “No!” Thorin backs off in an instant, adjusting his grip so that there’s no chance of him dropping the boys. They make it downstairs without incident. Bilbo is still asleep in the kitchen, but the warm scent of supper is gone, replaced by a sour odour, charred, like burnt meat. “Wake up, Bilbo,” Thorin says, and taps him with a foot, nearly losing his balance. He’s had too many months off from hauling lumber around the barn; his arms are losing strength.

            Bilbo wakes with a groan, lifting his head off the table to rub at his temples. “What is it?” he asks. They are all clustered around him, faces gaunt and drawn, eyes far too dark. “Thorin?” He blinks, and everything clears. Apart from a faint whiff of supper, burning, all is as it should be.

            “We need to go,” Thorin says.

            “I thought you were staying for a meal? Although, I guess it’s burnt now.”

            “No, all of us, we need to leave. Right now. Are you all right?”

            “Yes, I’m fine. Thorin, what’s wrong?”

            “Your house.”

            For a second Bilbo doesn’t follow. Is Bywater “his” house, his own? But, it is his, isn’t it? He bought it. Yes, and he’s called it his own. There’s something going on here that he’s missing, some detail he can’t pin down. As he looks around the room—his room—he plays idly with the ring on his finger, the gold warm to the touch. He notices Thorin staring at the ring, with a question in those stormy eyes, and quickly puts his hands beneath the table. Afterwards, he can’t really say why. “I’m staying,” he says.

            Thorin looks like he wants to argue but can’t get the words out. “You— But— Fine. We’re still going.” And he turns on his heel and marches out of the kitchen, ignoring the soreness in his arms, his wrenched shoulder still giving him pain and now Kíli’s weight on top of it. The front door doesn’t open. It’s not locked, he can turn the bolt without any trouble, but the hinges may as well be soldered together. The door won’t move. “Goddamn it,” Thorin says, and hitches the boys up higher, goes back to the kitchen. The back door won’t open either. He sets the boys down and examines the doorframe, the hinges, the latch, comes up with nothing. “Bilbo, what the hell is going on?” If only the doors didn’t open inward—they’d be easier to kick down.

            “What?”

            “Your doors. They won’t open.”

            “There’s no room,” Kíli says, very quietly, and Thorin swears and kicks the door anyway. It doesn’t even move.

            “Bilbo, I swear, if you don’t tell me what the hell is wrong with this house—”

            “I don’t know! I promise you, Thorin, I don’t. This has never happened before.” Or has it? Wasn’t there that night, his first week here, when he went to bed and woke up hours later in the sunken garden, covered in dew, sick to his stomach, and then couldn’t get back into the house? “Why do you want to leave?” he asks, thinking that if only they would just stay, there wouldn’t a problem.

            “Are you blind? Didn’t you see—well, _anything_ , just now?” There aren’t any words for it: that’s the problem.

            “I was asleep.”

            “This house is . . . wrong.”

            “I thought you liked it. You said so, the very first day.”

            “Then I was wrong. Bilbo, we have to go.”

            “I don’t see how,” Bilbo says, “if the doors won’t open.”

            “We’ll break a window. Boys, stand back. Move, Bilbo.” Thorin gestures away from the nook windows, and though Bilbo looks at him like he’s insane, he does move. Thorin raises one heavy boot and kicks at the wide window pane, feels his foot go through it, the bite of glass in his leg, and then he’s flat on his back on the kitchen floor and the window is unbroken, not even cracked. And his leg is bleeding, though the canvas of his pants isn’t torn. “Fuck,” Thorin breathes, and knocks his head back against the flagstones. “Fuck.”

 

Everything’s a bit of a blur, after that. They end up spending the night at Bywater—try as they might, neither Bilbo nor Thorin can find a way out of the house. It’s sealed itself off, a closed world, too full of questions to let anything escape. Bilbo offers them their choice of guestrooms but Thorin and the boys end up bunking together, crowded close in the double bed at the opposite end of the hall from the master bedroom, just over the kitchen. Thorin doesn’t sleep at all that night, sitting with his back against the headboard, Kíli tucked in on one side and Fíli on the other, his eyes on the locked door. The boys drop off in minutes, with the exhaustion that comes after the waning of fear. Bilbo, in the master bedroom, means to stay awake, too, but is out the second his head hits the pillow and doesn’t wake until it’s morning and Thorin is pounding on his door, shouting something about a fire.

            Except later when it actually is morning, and Bilbo goes downstairs expecting disaster, he sees Thorin making coffee in his underwear, white bandages around his leg, and Thorin says he never knocked on Bilbo’s door but goes pale at the mention of fire. He admits, not looking Bilbo in the eye, that he dreamt of Bywater, burning. Having the boys on either side of him, still smelling inexplicably of soot, probably didn’t help, though. They are leaning against each other in the nook now, only half-awake, wrapped in one of Bilbo’s spare quilts.

            “Are you sure?” Bilbo asks, leaning against the counter for support. “Are you sure you didn’t knock?”

            “Yeah, I’m sure.” Thorin pours boiling water into the French press and tries to ignore the throb of pain in his leg. Doesn’t tell Bilbo that when he lifted the bandages this morning to check on the wound it wasn’t the long, jagged cuts from broken glass he saw but skin blackened and blistered. Burnt. Doesn’t tell Bilbo, either, that the doors still won’t open. This is all just some kind of fever dream—it must be. Either that or he really is going mad. “What did you dream about?” he asks Bilbo, trying very hard to keep his voice light and probably failing. But then, he’s also trying not to think too hard about the fact that while his bloodstained pants are hanging off the back of a chair he’s standing in another man’s kitchen in his underwear, and asking him about his dreams. So he has a lot on his mind.

            “Water,” Bilbo says. “It’s always water, in this house.”

            Why can’t they figure this out? Thorin knows buildings like this one, knows them inside and out, and yet . . . The more work he does, the more time he spends here, the less familiar the house becomes. Perhaps if he just restores it, bit by bit, he can make it into the sort of place he knows it to be, underneath. There’s an idea—to tear down to the bones and build up again, to break these dusty rooms out of their pasts. There’s an idea, and it’s a stupid one. Thorin shakes his head and pushes the press down, breathes in the smell of coffee and tries to just _think_. “What now?” he asks. “Bilbo?” When he turns around, Bilbo is gone. Thorin steps out into the hall, then doubles back to pick up the boys. “Bilbo, where’d you go?”

            No sign of him in the front hall, the parlour, the drawing room. The half-bath on the ground floor is empty. Upstairs is all quiet, the bedrooms dark, the remaining baths vacant; the attic stairs creak under their combined weight, but Bilbo isn’t up there, either. “Boys, wake up. We have to find Bilbo.”

            “Is he playing hide and seek?” Kíli asks.

            “No, he’s— Er, yeah. Something like that. Come on. Help me look.” Thorin sets them down, pauses to grab his parka from the hook in the entryway—the house is cold and damp, thanks to an early morning rain. While he’s there, he tries the door again. Where he expected resistance there is none; the door swings open at first touch. The smell of lilacs almost knocks him back on his feet, sweet and clear against the musty air in the hallway. “Fíli! Come here, and bring your brother.”

            “Did you find Bilbo?” Fíli asks, holding Kíli’s hand.

            “No. We’re leaving. Go out to the truck. I’ll meet you there in a minute.” Thorin puts a cautious foot out the door. When nothing happens, he moves to stand in the doorway, so there’s no chance of it closing.

            “We can’t leave until we find Bilbo,” Kíli says, very seriously.

            “Kíli, I said we’re leaving and I meant now. Go on outside.” Thorin throws his parka on and reaches back to grab Fíli and Kíli. The boys hang back, just out of reach—Thorin can’t get to them, not without taking his foot out of the doorway. “Come here, you two.”

            “We have to find Bilbo. You said so.”

            “There’s no time!” Thorin shouts. “Damn it, I swear I’ll find him but you need to get out of here.”

            “We’re not going without you, either,” Fíli says. “You said you’d be here, with us.”

            Thorin lets out a noise of aggravation. “I _will._ Go, and I’ll meet you outside.” Just one step, and he could reach them. One step. If he’s quick about it, nothing can happen. There’s no wind to blow the door shut, and it’s not as though it would just shut on its own. Right? He takes one last look from the front lawn to the boys before stepping back to grab Fíli’s sleeve. Just as he pushes the boys towards the doorway, Bywater shifts, or the earth rears up, or something—Thorin can replay the scene a hundred times in his mind and still not know. All he sees is the door swinging shut and there they are, once again. Inside, with no way out. “Damn it, no!” Thorin kicks the door, over and over, slumps down against it when it refuses to move.

            “Uncle?” Fíli asks, or Kíli—their voices are wrong again. Thorin looks up, dreading what he’ll see, but they’re standing there, fine, safe. Normal. He’s going mad. He must be. But there is something up with _this house_ , he can feel it, and where the fuck is Bilbo? Did he make it out? Is he standing out there, even now, waiting for them? Has he known, all along, what was going on? Standing out there, laughing at them—No. The door might not open but Thorin can still see out through the windows, unless even those are a mirage. Either way, no one’s outside.

            “It’s all right,” he tells the boys, his voice ragged. “We’re going to be fine.” The kitchen seems farther away than ever, the hall longer and darker than before, as if the house has slipped a little farther beneath the ground. They might still be able to leave by the back door, Thorin thinks, and the boys follow after him. The coffee is steaming in the press; Bilbo’s spare quilt lies in a discarded heap on the floor. Through the glass of the back door Thorin can see the walls of the sunken garden, the trees beyond swaying in the wind. No sign of Bilbo.

            “What now?” Fíli asks. His fingers in Thorin’s are cold.

            “I— I don’t know.” Thorin runs a hand over the doorframe, testing for weak spots. It doesn’t seem possible that only Monday he was sitting here fixing the door while Bilbo made lemonade. Three days later, and everything has turned inside out, or upside down—whichever words you want to use, the situation’s fucked up. Thorin presses his face to the glass, breathes out, watches the window pane fog over. He wipes the condensation away with the sleeve of his jacket, and in the clearing glass Bilbo appears out of nowhere, before them on the flagstones just outside the back door. He’s dry despite the rain, and holding a book in one hand, the gold ring in the other. For a second Thorin thinks he’s a ghost: the landscape seems to spread out through him, trees where limbs should be, clouds in his eyes. Then Bilbo opens the door and the illusion is gone and he’s just Bilbo, small and rumpled in yesterday’s clothes, his glasses slightly askew. “I didn’t think you were coming,” he says, and tries to step inside.

            “What are you talking about? Where have you been?” Thorin blocks Bilbo’s way. He’s not going to let another door close, not when they’re so close to getting out.

            “I was just in the study. Reading. This book . . . Do you know what this is?”

            “I don’t care about the fucking book, Bilbo! How did you get outside?”

            “Outside?” Bilbo asks, blinking slowly. No, that’s not right. “I was in the study. Waiting for you.”

            “No, you weren’t. We looked for you, everywhere. You were just . . . gone.”

            Standing there at the threshold, in more ways than one, Bilbo and Thorin look at each other now. Really _look_ , that is—look hard and look twice. Is it real, what they’re seeing? Can you ever really see someone? Thorin reaches out a hand, not to pull Bilbo in but to pull himself forward, out of Bywater. The boys follow, drawn together in his wake. And then they’re outside, standing there in the soft spring rain, and all around them the scent of lilacs, the garden lush and green.

            “Don’t look back now,” Bilbo says, “but I think my house is fading.” And he gives a laugh, brittle, disbelieving. “You’ll never guess what I’ve been reading.”

            Thorin doesn’t understand why they’re still talking about a book, after everything. It takes every bit of his willpower not to turn around. He can feel Bywater behind him, shifting—imagines it fading in and out like static, blurring with the rain. “What have you been reading?” Fíli asks, after waiting in vain for his uncle to ask first.

            “It’s the history of this house. The history of Bywater.”

            “Where did you find that?” Thorin asks, sharp. “I thought—”

            “Well, that’s the thing. I didn’t find it. I . . . apparently, I _wrote_ it.”

            “What?”

            “This book, it’s . . . it’s _my_ book. It’s what I’ve been writing, ever since I moved here.” Bilbo holds the book out to Thorin. It’s really just a collection of pages, bound together with thread, the ink running a little in the rain. Thorin doesn’t take it. “Go on,” Bilbo says.

            Thorin shakes his head. “Don’t give that to me.”

            “Take it.”

            “I don’t want to know anymore.”

            “I don’t understand,” Bilbo says.

            “Yeah, well . . . that makes two of us.” Thorin, with a hand each on Fíli and Kíli’s shoulders, turns his face to the sky and closes his eyes.


	6. epilogue

It’s Thursday, the first of May; they are standing under a May-tree in full bloom. They bury the book— _Bywater House, A History,_ by Bilbo Baggins, all the words he does not remember writing—in the sunken garden. As Bilbo helps Thorin dig, the gold ring slips off his finger, tumbles into the hole. Thorin goes to pick it up. “Don’t!” Bilbo shouts, and when Thorin pauses, and gives him a curious look, he only says, “Leave it there. I think . . . it was never meant for me.”

            “You’re sure?” Thorin asks.

            “Yes,” Bilbo says, “I’m sure,” even though he isn’t, and fills in the hole. A single white blossom falls from the tree and lands in his hair. Thorin lifts a hand to brush it aside; something makes him pocket the blossom, instead of letting it fall to the ground. Later on he’ll find it, still fresh as the day it fell, and rub the petals between his fingers, and remember.

            It takes them a while to sort out the mess, all the unasked and unanswered questions, Thorin’s blood on the kitchen floor and ash in the attic, trickling down into the upstairs study. Thorin never does read the book. Seeing the story written out, black lines on white paper, would have made things too real in his mind. He’d rather remember it in Bilbo’s voice, hushed, cautious, telling them all under the barest sliver of a waxing moon: how Bywater was built, so long ago, and how the history it holds grew and grew until the house was fairly overflowing with it, until the house was so full of memories that there was no place—no room—for anything else. And the house . . . _turned._ The words on the page, though they were typed with Bilbo’s own fingers, are too jumbled to make out, scratched through and blotted, too many letters on the page. Previous generations of owners tried to burn the house down, and when the flames didn’t take they doused the house with water, and when the windows didn’t break under the force of hoses they left the house behind and there it stood, for forty years. Waiting. Taking its time.

            Thorin doesn’t believe the story. Bilbo says he doesn’t either. And yet neither of them knows what to think, and none of that means anything for the fact that here they are, with a house no longer closed against them but open, the windows and doors flung wide open to the late morning air.

             Bywater is changed now. Neither of them can say how but both feel it, in the air they breathe, in the firmness of the floors, in the sudden brightness that has overtaken the house. There is light—everywhere. And everything has found its place. After the rain stopped yesterday they went back into the house and found only stillness. As if great emptiness opened up inside. “I can’t fill it all on my own, you know,” Bilbo tells Thorin, and reaches out his hand. It could be theirs, this emptiness, this space, these rooms. Theirs to fill, and theirs to connect—only connect.

            But Thorin doesn’t take his hand. “I don’t think it should be filled,” he says, and his eyes are hard as he looks back at Bilbo. They are so far apart.

            Thorin takes the boys back to the flat, though they plead with him to stay, though Bilbo stands in the doorway where the lilacs bloom and watches them go until they’re out of sight, over the hills and down into the glen. Bilbo stands in the doorway for a long, long time. This isn’t the ending they were meant to have, either of them, and he knows it. But how to fix it? Thorin is gone, and he took the boys with him, so now Bilbo is here, alone, again. On his own in this big, empty house. He shivers, and steps back inside. Bywater sighs around him, a whispering sound, like turning pages in an old book. Bilbo’s memories of the night and the early morning are blank; try as he might, he can’t remember anything, beyond going into the study Wednesday night when he couldn’t sleep, and sitting at the typewriter. Then, leaving the study, and meaning to go into the kitchen, where he heard Thorin making coffee—Thorin, who he’d been expecting to come running to the noise of the typewriter keys. And then he was outside, standing in the rain. That’s it. There isn’t any more. His mind is as blank and empty as the attic, and he has no more idea about one than the other.

            These are his options: go after them, or wait for them to return, or do nothing. “What should I do?” Bilbo wonders aloud. The house doesn’t answer. It really is empty now.

            The silence in the Land Cruiser is deafening, a roar in Thorin’s ears as he guides them out of the highlands and down towards the city. He thought he’d figured it out, that feeling that he was missing something, that there was something he couldn’t see—he thought he’d left it behind. But here it is again. Is this the right choice? Was it a choice, at all? Here, in the cramped space of this truck, is everything he cares about. How could he make them stay, after everything that happened?

            And yet Fíli  is asking, “Why are we leaving?” and Kíli says, “Yeah, I wanted to stay.”

            What answer can he give? What answer is there? The choices we make, and the places we choose, and the words we say: all of these things, in the end, amount to nothing. All you can do—all you can ever do—is move forward, with all that you have.

            “Uncle?”

            “It’s not our home,” Thorin says, finally. “It never was.”

            “It _could_ be,” Kíli says. “If we went back.”

            They don’t turn around. The city feels dirtier, their flat darker, everything somehow smaller than it was before. Thorin helps the boys get cleaned up—washes the soot out of their hair, cleans a scrape on Kíli’s knee—and then takes a long shower of his own as they sleep in the next room. They are, all of them, shaken, and tired, a little less certain of the world today than yesterday, aching with hunger for more than they can say. The water is hot and smells faintly of sulfur as Thorin tips his head back into the spray. His leg is healed, no trace of burns, not even any lingering pain. It’s as if the past few days never happened. Perhaps they never did. Perhaps he’ll wake up tomorrow and it will be April again, and raining.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \----------
> 
> I set out to write a ghost story, a story about a haunted house, after spending a year teaching uni first-years mystery fiction. I don't think I achieved that. The question of how exactly to classify this remains unanswered, for me. The point was never the haunting, or the ghosts. The epigraph is immensely important to me, and that's really what drove all of this. And just like Agee ends with hope, there is hope here, too, if you're looking for it. I think there is.
> 
> Let me know your thoughts? In comments below, or over on tumblr at stick-around-town.
> 
> And please be sure to check out the artists for this fic, and their works! Links are in the opening notes. Leave them your thoughts, too; they're really great.


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